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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 



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NJlIlOIjlL DANGEI} IN MUjM 



OR 



KELIGION AND THE NATION. 



Rev. I. J. LANSING, A.M., 

Author of " Romanism and the Kefublic.'* 



>NS51894 



ARNOLD PUBLISHING ASSOCIATIO 
BOSTON. MASS. 




Copyrighted. 



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iv 



1 H& LltoK-rtAV^ 

WASHINGTON 



THE READER. 



1!I1U yOU"Ll!liy address, one of twelve, in the hope that your 
interest will be awakened in this effort to bring to the light the 
Komanism that boldly, by its most trusted leaders, declares its 
purpose to capture this country for the Papacy, and couples its 
word with a determined effort to undermine and destroy our Public 
Schools ; to have Parochial Schools, under some guise, supported 
by the State; to obtain the public moneys for its various institu- 
tions, and in general to corrupt and weaken our distinctively 
American and Protestant life by entering as a Church into Munici- 
pal, State, and National Politics. 
Read the titles of these patriotic addresses, and then — 

1. Send us a silver dime for any two of thenif as 
sample copies t or 

2. Send us the names of five to ten persons tvho 
believe in our Public School Si/stem and in the 
American Idea of Separation of Church and State, 
and no appropriations for Sectarian Institutions, or 

3. Avail yourself of one of our Special Offers, or 
subscribe to the Envelope Series, and so help us to 
scatter these clean, strong, reliable publications all 
over our land, this Columbian year, when every effort 
is being tnade to glorify the Church that has cursed 
Europe for twelve centuries under the name of 
Christianity With the most unspeakable despotism, 
known to history ; and 

MAT GOD SPEED THE RIGHT. 



RELIGION AND THE NATION. 



I WISH to speak to you this afternoon on Religion 
and the Nation, and I have chosen three texts from 
the Holy Scriptures which show their relationship. 
In Psalms xxxiii. 12 we read, " Blessed is the nation 
whose God is the Lord ; and the people whom he hath 
chosen for his inheritance." In Psalms xxii. 28, "For 
the kingdom is the Lord's : and he is the governor 
among the nations." While in Matthew xxviii. 19 our 
Lord says, " Go ye therefore, and teach all nations." 

The star of Bethlehem is no more the adequate 
symbol of Christ's presence in the world. For one 
radiant point, shining out into the gloom of night, is 
not sufficient to indicate the diffused light of his 
presence who came to be the Sun of righteousness. 
To-day the fitting type of Christ, in the world, is the 
radiant sun, as he mounts toward the zenith, illumi- 
nating every place and disclosing everything upon 
the upturned hemisphere. So Christ and Christ's 
truth are not to be directed merely to minute personal 
affairs, but are to be applied in the largest way to 
matters of the greatest magnitude. Therefore it is 
that this day, in a land whose birthright I would not 
exchange for a birthright in any other nation under 
heaven, and in concord with the Christian Church, 

1 



2 Rellylon and the Nation. 

which has attained a purity and efficiency exceeding 
that of any former time, in harmony with teachers 
who, on this holy day and every day, plead for truth, 
I lift my humble voice to make some application of 
the religion of Jesus Christ and of the truth of God 
to the affairs of this nation. 

By religion, 1 mean the great principles which 
relate to God and his law and to the human soul in 
its deepest convictions, acts, and necessities. By the 
nation, 1 mean that organization of men which, undei' 
the divine law, as a civil state, has to do with the 
moi*al and temporal welfaie of humanity, which ren- 
ders progress possible, which protects the weak, which 
upholds all virtue, and seeks the common good. To 
be more specific, when I speak of religion and the 
nation, I mean to speak of the religion of the Lord 
Jesus Christ : that religion which we have from the 
Holy Scriptures, which tells us of God and of Jesus 
Christ his vSon, who came into the world to save 
sinners ; that Gospel which teaches us of the Holy 
Spirit and of right dispositions, which telLs us that a 
human chaiacter should bring forth, as fruits of the 
Holy Spirit, '' love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentle- 
ness, goodness, meekness, faith, and temperance ; " 
that religion Avhose law is, " Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, and thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself ; " that religion whose trinity of 
graces is faith, hope, and charit}^ ; that religion whose 
law of human progress is that we should '' add to 
faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowl- 
edge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to 
patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kind- 



Religion and the Nation. 3 

ness, and to brotherly kindness charity." And of 
that religion I speak in its application to this nation — 
to this nation with its marvellous physical configura- 
tion, with its wonderful origin, its equally remarkable 
colonization, its institutions, and its struggles. So, 
then, to apply the religion of Christ to the United 
States of America, in which we live, and to show its 
relation thereto, is my purpose. 

I. And the first proposition which I present, as 
worthy of your attention, is this : That religion 

HAS A VERY INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE 
NATION. 

1. In saying this, I but quote the opinion of the 
fathers and founders who laid the corner-stone of this 
government. This is not an atheistic State, and never 
will be till it is totally changed from its earlier and 
present conditions. In the cabin of the Mayflower 
the Pilgrim Fathers, on the 11th of November, 1620, 
entered into this voluntary compact : " In the name 
of God, amen : We, whose names are underwritten, 
the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign King James, 
having undertaken, for the glory of God and advance- 
ment of the Christian faith, and honor of our king 
and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the 
northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, 
solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and 
one of another, covenant and combine ourselves 
together into a civil body politic, for our better or- 
dering and preservation and furtherance of the ends 
aforesaid : and, by virtue hereof, to enact, constitute, 
and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, 
constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall 



4 Religion and the Nation. 

be thought most convenient for the general good of 
the colony. Unto which we promise all due submis- 
sion and obedience." " Here," says Bancroft, " was 
the birth of popular constitutional liberty." The 
founders of this country were devoted to religion ; 
were seeking " the glory of God and the advancement 
of the Christian faith." 

In the writings of the fathers and founders of the 
republic, there has been a most constant recognition 
of these principles. In their confession of the divine 
presence and the divine guidance, there is an accord- 
ance as of the Psalms of a nation. The recognition 
of the origin and continuity of the nation in God is 
repeated in the inaugurals of the Presidents. The 
words of its great citizen, Franklin, which reached 
to the foundations of political thought, in the most 
critical hour of the convention of the representatives 
of the people for the formation of the constitution, 
were as follows : " We have been answered in the 
sacred writings, that except the Lord build the house, 
they labor in vain that build it. I firmly believe this : 
and I also firmly believe this, that without his concur- 
ring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no 
better than the builders of Babel." President Wash- 
ington said in his first inaugural, '' No people can be 
bound to adore the hand which conducts the affairs 
of men more than the people of the United States." 
Thomas Jefferson, often misquoted as an unbeliever, 
said at the close of his inaugural, " I shall need, too, 
the favor of that Being, in whose hands we all are, 
who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native 
land, and planted them in a country flowing with all 



Religion and the Nation. 6 

the comforts and the necessaries of life ; who has 
covered our infancy with his providence, and our 
riper years with his wisdom and power, and to whose 
goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me." 
The last inaugural of President Lincoln shows that 
the preserver of the republic was no less devoted to 
God than its founders. Its whole thought was 
gathered up in the recognition of One whose judg- 
ments are true and righteous altogether. And the 
words of Gladstone, and Disraeli his great antagonist, 
representatives of our great mother nation, are a like 
expression of the truth, that the foundation of con- 
stitutional liberty in Great Britain, as the foundation 
of the national life of these United States, is laid in 
firm and devoted recognition of religion. 

2. Such is also the truth of the Holy Scripture, 
as I have read it in these texts, which are merely 
selected from hundreds of others. A holy nation 
was chosen first, out of all the peoples of the earth. 
Its prophets and preachers were statesmen and 
diplomatists ; its principles were principles which 
every student of political life tells us are the most 
fundamental to the welfare of any and every state. 
No nation has ever existed on the face of the earth that 
took better care of the poor, that provided better for 
the welfare of the people at large, that afforded greater 
liberty, than the state of the Hebrews in the early cen- 
turies. Our Lord recognizes the same great truth 
when he sends his disciples to teach the nations ; to not 
merely teach individuals, but to saturate society with 
his truth. What we find, therefore, in revelation 
confirms the opinions and actions of the fathers of 



6 Religion and the Nation. 

this republic, and assures us that in the divinest ideal 
of the State, religion and the nation are very closely 
allied. 

3. When we come to consider certain great facts in 
the history of this nation, they can never be separated 
from religious considerations. Suppose for a moment 
we survey the marvellous territory on which we live, 
comparing it with Canada, or Mexico, or South 
America, or any European land. If a man has any 
conception of Providence, if he believes at all in the 
ordering hand of God, as did Franklin, Washington, 
Jefferson, and Lincoln in the above quotations, he 
must think that only divine providence could have 
preserved this marvellous virgin continent for a na- 
tion, singular and unlike all other nations in its foun- 
dation, in its purpose, and hitherto in its progress. 
Separated from all neighbors who might contend 
against us, with treasures the vastest and most won- 
derful, with every facility, to grow unhindered, we 
have here an evidence of that divine goodness which 
seemed to reserve for constitutional liberty and human 
development the fairest portion of all the earth. 

4. When we reflect on the foundation and birth of 
this nation, we perceive that it was born of conscience 
and of religious faith. Whether we behold the 
English Pilgrims, who came from over the sea to our 
shores that they might have freedom to worship God, 
and to found a free church in a free State ; whether we 
consider the Dutch, who confirmed the principles of 
liberty and gave its institutions to our Pilgrim fore- 
fathers, and who laid the foundations in New York, 
of a State like that which they had wrested from 



Religion and the Nation. 1 

Philip the Second and the Duke of Alva ; whether 
we observe the genial spiritual graces of the soul in 
the reverent and peace-loving Quakers who in Penn- 
sylvania reared a State which, at its beginnings, was 
essentially religious ; or dwell on the Swedes in Del- 
aware, the English in Virginia and Georgia, and the 
Huguenots in South Carolina, — the whole line of 
these early colonists, who, fleeing from superstition 
and oppression in the Old World, made of their lives 
the beginnings of this republic, is a line radiant with 
conscience, glorious with piety, splendid with faith. 

5. Not only is this true, but it is also true that the 
institutions which have Ibeen founded in this nation 
are peculiarly related to religion in their character and 
purpose. 

Remarking on the institutions which make us a 
nation, I should name first a free 'church in a free 
State, existing without the trammels of civil author- 
ity. I should comment on a free school, which cannot 
be thought of without a free church : no free school, 
no free church ; no free church, no free school. I 
should speak of that remarkable symbol of pure de- 
mocracy, the town meeting, which is more realty 
democratic than almost any other organization that 
we have known in the political history of our land. 
These institutions of our country, all standing around 
and defending the home, seem to possess in their 
nature the essential necessity of religion. Where else 
but in religion did our fathers get the idea of free 
thought, free conscience, free discussion, free intelli- 
gence, free education, and pure morality ? 

6. The struggles of this nation have been likewise 



8 Religion and the Nation. 

very largely efforts that had a peculiar religiousness 
in their character. Our wars have not been for con- 
quest of territory, or for the overthrow of other 
states. At first our fathers, in the colonial days, con- 
tended for their homes against the Indian and the 
French. Later the Revolutionary struggle was with 
Great Britain for the right to a free manhood, a reli- 
gious principle of which the Bible is full. When in 
1812 there was another contention with Great Britain, 
it was in order that American men on the seas might 
be as free as American men on the land. And when 
finally there came the fearful burden and struggle of 
civil war, it was once more tRe birth-throe of liberty, 
that we might be rid of the curse, which, despite our 
Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, 
had come upon us in the form of African slavery. 
So the struggles of the nation seem to me to be very 
intimately related to religion, and to arise from noble 
rather than from selfish principles. 

7. But further than this, there is, as I may say, a soul 
in every nation. Until you have travelled to foreign 
parts, and know the difference with which men regard 
the government in other lands and in this, you can- 
not realize what it means to be an American. There 
is a moral purpose in a nation, a moral life, a moral 
drift, a moral thought. I almost said there was a soul 
in a nation. And if there is, the soul of this nation 
is essentially moral and religious. If I were to ask 
what is the leading thought and purpose of America, 
I should find it in that text around the old Liberty 
bell, which rang on the first Fourth of July, whereon 
you read, " Proclaim liberty throughout all the land 



Religion and the Nation. 9 

to all the inhabitants thereof." The thought of 
America is the thought of humanity ; the largest 
privilege for man under law ; the protection of the 
weak, the uplifting of the lowly, universal benevo- 
lence. Friends, there is a ground-swell in America, 
which, as the feet of men from other shores touch our 
soil, lifts them. (Applause.) They who have come 
from afar have felt this, and know that it is true. 
The moral trend and purpose of this nation is so dis- 
tinctively religious that it may be said we cannot 
think of the nation as divorced from religion. 

8. But there is another view of this same truth 
which impresses me profoundly to-day : that is, that 
the perils of our country are equally the perils of reli- 
gion; that the enemies of our country are equally 
the enemies of true religion ; that the antagonists of the 
United States of America are just as much the antag- 
onists of the Christian Church in the broad sense of 
the word Christian. 

I think that I can show this very plainly, and that 
the proposition, though it may seem startling, can be 
proven exactly true. Find me a foe of this nation 
to-day, anywhere, and I think I can find you in that 
same foe the antagonist of the religion of Christ. 
There is a linking and blending together of religion, 
not the church as an organization, but religion and 
the nation, such that their enemies are identical. 
You can understand that there may be a state, a 
nation, which true religion would antagonize. I 
should say, for instance, that true religion in Russia 
would be in antagonism to the present tyrannous 
form of government. You can understand that there 



10 Religion and the Nation. 

may be a state so vile, and in it a religion so false, 
that the two are mutually destructive, and that the 
destruction of either is no loss to mankind. But 
assuming that the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ 
is the best religion of the world or the ages, I think 
it is plain that whatever is antagonistic to it, and at 
the same time antagonistic to this nation, is not good 
in itself nor good in its influence. 

In illustration and proof of this I ask : What are 
some of the manifest foes of this nation to-day, which 
make us tremble when we think of our country's 
future ? 

I may not name those which you regard as the 
most important, but let me mention three or four. 

1. An evident foe of this nation is drunkenness 
and the liquor traffic. I speak of this not in detail, 
but in the broadest aspect. As a producer of crime, 
where it has a dreadful supremacy ; as a creator of 
vice, where it has unparalleled power, — it is more than 
manifest that drunkenness and the liquor traffic are 
hostile to the nation. If crime is a nation's enemy, 
if vice is a country's curse, then the traffic which cre- 
ates them is equally so. Also from the standpoint 
of economics and wealth, drunkenness and the liquor 
traffic are foes of the nation to this extent, that, 
as Gladstone says, more than war or pestilence or 
famine or all combined, they have impoverished 
society. 

From the economic standpoint this foe is every- 
where destructive. There is not a man who by 
drunkenness lowers his own ability for production 
and his own capacity for consumption, but what by 



Religion and the Nation. 11 

just so much diminishes the nation's wealth and his 
own. And we know that this curse does both. 

Moreover, as rehited to politics, the saloon is gov- 
erning cities so far, and cities are governing the State 
to such an extent, that we all see there is peril here. 
When the votes of cbunkards control America, her 
doom is sealed. As you observe, therefore, this an- 
tagonist, this foe which strikes every holy thing in 
the nation a deadly blow, which debases every man 
and woman and child, every institution and interest, 
who is not impressed with the fact that it is at the 
same time the antagonist of the Christian religion ? 
Is there any doubt in the mind of any person here 
that among the most pronounced of the hindrances 
and foes of ^Christianity, the church, and virtue is this 
same traffic ? 

2. Another of the perils of this nation to-day is from 
unrestricted immigration. Everybody is thinking 
about it and talking about it more than they have at 
any time since you can remember. We all recog- 
nize the desirability of having multitudes of men 
come from other lands to develop the enormous re- 
sources of our country. There is room on our vast 
areas for hundreds of millions of souls. We want 
America for Americans, but we want Americans for 
America just as much. (Applause.) We want people 
here who are the right kind of people, fit to be citi- 
zens. But it is noticeable that of the 430,000 immi- 
grants who came into this country at the port of New 
York last year, and of the five and a quarter millions 
who have come in since 1881, there are many wholly 
unfit for citizenship in the United States. So low 



12 Religion and the Nation. 

has the quality of immigrants fallen that many of our 
thoughtful people are saying, that we have become 
the dumping-ground of Europe. The New York Sun 
of Dec. 31, 1891, says that a hundred thousand of the 
people who landed at that port alone last year ought 
to have been sent back on the steamers that brought 
them. 

Two weeks ago to-morrow I read in a New York 
paper that on the day before twenty-one Italian 
criminals had landed there at one time, of whom two 
were murderers, the others all convicts ; and although 
the two murderers had been arrested, even they were 
likely to be permitted to stay. Now, add to this the 
fact, which is very well known, that these immi- 
grants furnish so large a preponderance of the crimi- 
nals and paupers, and you can see how dangerous is 
this immigration to America. I find that Frederic H. 
Wines, who is the special agent and expert appointed 
by the Census Bureau of the United States on Statis- 
tics of Paupers and Crime, quoted in the North Ameri- 
can Review for April, 1892, says that of the 43,000 
penitentiary convicts reported June 1, 1890, whose 
birth and parentage are known, one-third were foreign 
born, and a great many more were born of foreign 
parents on these shores. While numbering less than 
one-sixth of the population, the foreign born furnish 
one-third of the criminals in penitentiaries. The 
Secretary of the Department of Public Charities and 
Correction of the city of New York says that " the 
superintendent of the workhouse expresses the opin- 
ion that 90 per cent of the native born committed 
are the children of foreign parents, and doubtless 



Religion and the Nation. 18 

this is true of other institutions." This is an ominous 
showing, making nearly two-thirds of our criminals 
of immediate foreign extraction. We dwell upon it 
to make perfectly clear that if people so vicious and 
so incapable are brought here and are naturalized and 
begin to govern America, they are a great menace to 
the nation. 

Now, I ask you is it not equally true that these 
same undesirable and degraded immigrants to whom 
I have referred are the enemies of true religion? 
Where is the New England Sabbath since they came 
here ? and where is the public virtue in municipalities 
as compared with former days since these became the 
makeweight of our national politics? I have no 
hesitation in saying that to-day the adamantine wall 
against the progress of the Christian Church and 
Christian morality in this country is very largely the 
foreign people, with ideas immoral and dangerous. 
And I am amazed that when this is the fact we do 
not dare to carry the truth of God to them for fear 
that their tyrants, clerical or political, will not like it, 
and may curse us for so doing. (Applause.) 

3. But again, another of the antagonists of America, 
which at the same time is an antagonist of true 
religion, is corrupted politics. Well may we awaken 
and look about us to see how dangerous a foe this is. 
When selfish politicians for mere gain, and political 
rings for mere plunder, are controlling so many of 
the municipalities of this country, well may we 
awaken and reflect. Take, for example, the city of 
New York, our metropolis, great in numbers and 
great in wealth, but the shame of America as she 



14 Religion and the Nation. 

stands to-day in the political world. When an emi- 
nent clergyman, a month and a half ago, lifted up his 
voice in the Madison Square Presbyterian pulpit in 
New York City, and denounced the government of 
the city of New York as a government of thugs, 
thieves, and criminals, declaring that the worst thing 
you could say of them was to write their actual history, 
and that this would be dangerously near to obscenity, 
many of the conservative pulpits and the conservative 
people wondered that Dr. Parkhurst allowed himself 
to be so sensational. Some of the newspapers 
abused him, Tammany Hall threatened him, the 
Grand Jury reproved him. He waited, collected 
overwhelming proofs, and a month from that time, in 
his pulpit and before the Grand Jury and the public, 
not only verified all that he had said and demon- 
strated it, but much more. And this one man has 
done more to scare the dive-keepei^ and the criminals, 
the gamblers and the prostitutes of New York than all 
their police for the last twelve months. The Grand 
Jury since then declare that the whole police force of 
New York City is bribed by criminals with from seven 
to ten million dollare a year. What the brave minister 
said was true. When I speak of corrupt politics, what 
more need I say to those who love their country than 
that to-day, by the verdict of a prominent non-partisan 
committee of the Bar Association of the city of New 
York, it is averred and proved that the man who has 
lately been appointed to be a judge in the Court of 
Appeals of the State of New York, the highest court 
in the State, is at this present moment deserving of 
State's Prison for a crime against the election laws. 



Religion and the Nation. 15 

and is in his present position as a reward from the 
Governor of the State for the perpetration of that 
crime. If there is any deeper damnation for corrupt 
politics than this, where will you find it ? When the 
judiciary of great States, governors and senators, the 
police and the executive of the great cities of this 
country (for how much better is Chicago, and how 
much different are Boston and Brooklyn and Balti- 
more ? ) — when these have been made thus corrupt, 
may not the nation recognize in them the most dan- 
gerous perils from political debauchery? But are 
not these at the same time the antagonists of true 
religion? Can you imagine true religion in unity 
with this type of debauchees? Can we not agree 
with Dr. Parkhurst when he says, speaking of his 
own work, '' From the very commencement of my 
ministry here, I confess that to be of some encourage- 
ment and assistance to young men has been my great 
ambition. There is little advantage in preaching the 
gospel to a young man on Sunday if he is going to 
be sitting on the edge of a Tammany-maintained hell 
all the rest of the week." In harmony with this 
truthful and sagacious utterance, I am ready to say 
that if all the preachers in this country would let 
alone metaphysics for a week, all the 'isms and 'ologies, 
take off their coats and pitch into the scamps, official 
and otherwise, in our communities, they would do 
more to save the young men than by any other process 
I can think of. (Applause.) Not that I think the 
ministers ought to become police, but I think we 
ought to have relief from the curse of utterly shame- 
less, selfish, demagogic politics, even if ministers have 
to accomplish it. (Applause.) 



16 Religion and the Nation. 

4. Again, a great enemy of our country is illiteracy, 
and it is not more an enemy of the nation than it is 
of true religion. You know that a very large num- 
ber of people have come to these shores who cannot 
read and write. Many of them are voters, and 
enough of these cannot read their ballots, so that in 
their ignorance their votes are bought and sold like 
sheep in the shambles. An ex-president of the 
Board of Education of New York city says : " Four- 
fifths of all our criminals are uneducated. It costs 
S29.40 per annum to educate a child in a grammar 
school in this city, and fllO per annum to maintain 
a criminal in the penitentiary." It is cheaper to 
educate him, is it not ? 

There is a very close and dangerous relation be- 
tween illiteracy and crime — a relation generally 
known and conceded. 

Dr. William T. Harris, United States Commissioner 
of Education, in an address on '' Compulsory Educa- 
tion in Relation to Crime and Social Morals," says : 
" Statistics collected by Dr. E. C. Wines show that 
in France the number of persons under arrest from 
1867 to 1869 was 444,133, of whom 442,194 were 
roported as unable to read, making over 95 per cent. 
Of the illiterates there was an average of one arrest 
for each 41 persons, but only one arrest for 9,291 
persons who could read." While this seems too 
large a disproportion for America, yet all agree that 
compulsory education does act as a preventive of 
crime. 

The illiterate are the prey of every vice. They are 
endangered by every temptation, as those who are 



Religion and the Nation. 17 

educated and trained cannot be : and of them there 
is a host in this country. 

Do you not see that this foe of the nation is also 
hostile to true religion ? Is there any harmony be- 
tween true religion and mental stagnation ? Is not 
the whole spirit of the Old and New Testaments the 
spirit of a new intellectual as well as spiritual birth? 
Does not true religion offer itself to us in a Book 
that needs to be read, and is not one of the first 
duties of Christianity to teach a man to think, to 
acquire information, to study, and to reason ? Surely 
this is as true as any axiom. 

I have thus shown that religion and the nation are 
very intimately related, because the foes of one are 
the enemies of the other. I come now to apply this 
principle to a form of religion which claims the right 
to control this nation. 

II. The Roman Catholic^ or Papain Church in the 
United States of America is in league to a large extent 
with these foes of the nation, and therefore should not 
he pe7'mitted to govern this country as it proposes to do. 
Of the Roman Catholics of this country as indivi- 
duals, I speak with entire respect : many of them are 
noble and pious people, better than their creed. I 
do not denounce them personally, nor bear them any 
ill-will, but I speak of the system at large when I 
say the ecclesiastics of the Roman Catholic Church in 
this country are claiming America, and I am here to 
enter my protest and to say that their claim ought 
not to be allowed. 

1. Now, first, they claim it. Let me give you a few 
facts to certify to this. There is a book, a souvenir 



18 Religion and the Nation. 

of the Baltimore Congress of the Roman Catholic 
Church, entitled " Three Great Events in the History 
of the Catholic Church in the United States," pub- 
lished in Detroit, Mich., and which contains the 
addresses made on the occasion of the Congress, of 
the Centennial Celebration, and of the dedication of 
the Roman Catholic University in November, 1889. 
Here are some of the statements made in those ad- 
dresses : "It can hardly be doubted," says Dr. Brown- 
son, who writes the introduction, " that this is destined 
to be a Catholic land." Bishop Ireland says : " A 
magnificent future is before the church in this country 
if we are only true to her and to the country and to 
ourselves. Our work is to make America Catholic. 
Our cry shall be God wills it, and our hearts shall 
leap with crusader enthusiasm. We know the church 
is the sole owner of the truths and graces of salvation. 
The conversion of America should be ever present in 
the minds of Catholics in America as a supreme 
duty from which God will not hold them exempt. 
The importance of the possession of America to the 
cause of religion cannot well be over-estimated. 
The church triumphant in America, Catholic truth 
will travel on the wings of American influence. 
The American people made Catholic, nowhere shall 
we find a higher order of Christian civilization." 
" Why, the broad seal of the Catholic Church is 
stamped forever upon every corner of the continent," 
says Daniel Dougherty, their great lawyer orator. 
This, of course, implies right of possession. Edmund 
F. Dunne says : " Why, then, should we not love this 
land ? Is it not ours ? Is it not Columbia, daughter 



Religion and the Nation. 19 

of Catholic thought, of Catholic wealth, of Catholic 
courage ? Is not the whole country really a Catholic 
land, and is it not under the care of Catholic saints ? 
Are not their holy names borne by more than three 
hundred American cities ? " And so on. These are 
only samples of the all-pervading sentiments en- 
dorsed repeatedly by that great representative Roman 
Catholic body. 

2. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I raise this 
question : What is the relation of the Roman Catholic 
Church, as such, to each of the four enemies of the 
American nation of which I have spoken — drunken- 
ness, undesirable immigration, corrupt municipal poli- 
tics, and illiteracy? 

If they claim America, are they right in that 
claim ? Are they the people in whose hands the 
future of America should lie ? Are they friends of 
the nation, or in league with its worst foes ? 

3. What is the relation of the Roman Catholic 
Church at large, to drunkenness and liquor-selling ? 
The relation of their people, many of whom are very 
unfortunate in this respect, to the curse of strong 
drink is well described by one of their priests, the 
Rev. M. F. Foley of De Land, California, who writes 
in the Catholic Mirror^ which is Cardinal Gibbons 's 
own paper. He says : " Go into our prisons, our re- 
formatories, our almshouses ; go into our great 
asylums where numbers of children are being 
reared, in what must necessarily be a hot-house 
atmosphere, to face the storms of life. Go into the 
crowded tenements of our great cities, into their 
lowest dens and dives; see the misery, the squalor, 



20 Religion and the Nation. 

reigning there ; see the men and women, low and 
besotted ; see the little ones dying as flies in the fetid 
air, or, worse, living to poison the nation's moral 
atmosphere ; in a word, see degradation in its most 
repulsive forms. In these abodes of crime, of pov- 
erty, of misery, you will find thousands of Catholics. 
Ask what has brought to prison and almshouse, to 
reformatory and orphanage, to dive and brothel, so 
many children of the Church. Trumpet-toned comes 
back the answer : ' Drink, drink.' " Thus he says, 
and very eloquently, that many of them are the vic- 
tims of this dreadful traffic. But, says one, there 
are temperance societies among the members of the 
Roman Catholic church which are doing an excellent 
work. Concerning these societies, I quote still from 
Father Foley, in the Catholic Mirror^ when he says : 
" What is the attitude of Roman Catholic 3^oung 
men on the temperance question ? This is important, 
as the future of America is in their hands — one of 
such grave importance that I give the following 
statement. The following resolution was twice voted 
down by the Catholic Young Men's National Union, 
which held a convention recently in Philadelphia: 
' Resolved, That the Catholic Young Men's National 
Union, viewing the saloon as pre-eminently the 
source of evil to young men, use its utmost influence, 
and urge upon the societies connected with it to use 
their utmost efforts, to prevent Catholic young men 
from visiting saloons. And also to discountenance 
by all means possible the drinking customs of society." 
" That resolution was deliberately and decisively 
voted down twice in the Catholic Young Men's 



Religion and the Nation. 21 

National Union." In other words, not to read what 
he very fully explains, their National Temperance 
Society did not and would not say that they discour- 
aged young men from going to the saloon or drink- 
ing. Temperance men they are, so they claim. Then 
why would they not endorse this resolution ? What 
kind of temperance men are those who will not op- 
pose the saloon ? I ask further, what other church 
than the Roman Catholic Church would have done 
what they did when their great cathedral was build- 
ing in New York, before it was dedicated, when dram- 
selling on a very large scale was permitted and 
encouraged in that house in order to make money to 
finish it ? 

I do not desire to lay upon them any greater re- 
sponsibility than should be put there ; but I ask 
this other question : Has the Roman Catholic Church 
ever struck the saloon as it has struck the common 
schools? (Applause.) Has it ever threatened to 
take away the sacraments from the people who fre- 
quent saloons or sell liquor ? It has done that with 
reference to the common schools. Why not the saloons ? 
Do they hate free schools more than saloons ? The atti- 
tude which they hold toward their people is such that 
probably, if excommunication or withholding the 
sacraments were threatened, they might keep them 
out of the saloon ; but it has never been done. Now 
this I say before this community and before this 
intelligent audience : If that church has power to 
protest against and smite the liquor curse and does 
not do it, it is because it is in sympathy with it in 
some way or other. Who sell the liquor mostly in 



22 Religion and the Nation. 

in this city and elsewhere ? What names mostly are 
on the saloon signs? (Sensation.) Are these liquor- 
sellers in good standing in that communion? Could 
they be in any other? If not, I raise the question 
why is it that this mighty ecclesiastical organization 
has not taken the stand which that resolution which 
they voted down in their temperance society took in 
reference to the saloon ? The friend of the liquor 
traffic is not the friend of this nation. (Applause.) 

4. But again, as to the immigration that is coming 
to this country, and which is so very undesirable; 
where does it come from ? 

When I look over the list of immigrants, and I 
have several lists here indicating the nationality of 
those who come to this country, I ask myself, who of 
these are dangerous to the country ? Are they the 
immigrants who come from England, from the north 
of Ireland, from Scotland, or from Sweden, Norway, 
and Denmark ? Are these the most undesirable im- 
migrants we have? Or are we most afraid of the 
immigrants who come from Italy, from Bohemia, 
from Poland, from Hungary, from Austria, from 
France, from Ireland, from the Province of Quebec ? 
Which do we think of as being more dangerous to 
our civilization? Which furnish the paupers and 
criminals in such large proportion ? Now, you know, 
and everybody knows who knows me, that I have 
positively not one particle of dislike to a man of any 
nationality ; I care not what his color is, or of whom 
he was born, or where he saw the light, or whether he 
has a dollar or a million ; a man is a man for all 
that. But I want to know this, where do the immi- 



Religion and the Nation. 23 

grants come from who are so imperilling America 
to-day ? 

You know the answer as well as I. Almost all 
these immigrants whom we fear were under the abso- 
lute dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in the 
lands where they formerly lived, and a very large 
share of them are its superstitious devotees to-day. 
Hungary is Roman Catholic ; Austria and Poland 
also ; Italy, though it is fast drifting into infidelity ; 
Ireland, except Ulster ; France and Quebec. And we 
know that when these people come here they are flee- 
ing from tyranny — a tyranny which their own church 
has fostered in those lands ; but when they are here 
they are the people whom we wish had not come, un- 
less they are going to be different from what they were 
at home. Not because they are Roman Catholics, not 
because they are of this or that nationality, but be- 
cause they are dangerous to intelligence, virtue, 
sobriety, and liberty. (Applause.) These papal peo- 
ples are not good enough to rule America. (Great 
applause.) 

5. I proceed to raise another question. Municipal 
misgovernment is an antagonist of our country. Has 
the Roman Catholic Church any relation to this 
municipal misgovernment ? I return again to the city 
of New York as an illustration and answer. Almost 
every officer of that city is a loyal devotee of Rome. 
On the 2d of last March the birthday of Leo XIII. 
was celebrated, and the mayor of the city of New 
York was present in his official capacity. When 
Archbishop Corrigan came in, the mayor, Hugh J. 
Grant, fell on his knees, in the presence of the audi- 



24 Religion and the Nation. 

erice, before the archbishop, and kissed his hand in 
token of reverent submission. The executive head of 
the city of NeAV York thus did homage to the arch- 
bishop. The real mayor of the city of New York is 
Archbishop Corrigan. (Sensation.) And when Dr. 
Parkhurst scourges Tammany Hall, he lays his lash 
almost every time on the backs of the adherents of 
Archbishop Corrigan and the Papacy. (Great ap- 
plause.) Twenty-five years ago there were six ad- 
herents of the Roman Catholic Church in the city 
council of Boston ; to-day I believe there are about 
fifty. Is that government purer to-day than it was 
then, or otherwise ? I say calmly and truly that if 
the Papists of this countr}^ and the questions which 
they bring into politics were out of politics, we should 
have scarcely any difficult problem in the politics of 
our Northern States. It Is the truth — you know 
it is — the living truth, that this corruption came 
in with them, and that they fatten on it. Surely 
such politicians are not fit to control this nation. 
(Applause.) 

6. Now, finally, take the matter of illiteracy. When 
these illiterate people come to the United States, one 
would suppose that everybody who has a spark of 
humanity or patriotism would try to educate them. 
But first I want to know where 'these people come 
from, how come they to be illiterate, and how are 
they going to get the ability to read? I hold in my 
hand a little book in which is a table furnished by 
the Bureau of Education of the United States. It 
gives a list first of eight Roman Catholic countries 
and then of eight Protestant countries. They have 



Religion and the Nation. 25 

just about an equal area in square miles, and just about 
an equal population, 148,000,000 in one case, and 149,- 
000,000 in the other, and what is the fact in regard 
to relative illiteracy ? In the Roman Catholic coun- 
tries sixty out of every hundred cannot read and 
write ; in the eight Protestant countries only four out 
of every hundred people cannot read and write. That 
is to say, the proportion of illiterates in those Roman 
Catholic countries is fifteen times as great as in those 
Protestant countries. These are official figures, and 
indisputable. Does this mean anything to you? 
Does it not suggest a potent cause of illiteracy ? 

When the Roman Catholic Church boasts of its 
educating, I allow that the education of the aristocracy 
has been an object of their attention in all European 
countries ; but show me the country where they have 
educated the common people, either in Europe or on 
the Western Continent? When these people come 
here we suppose that they come because our country is 
more desirable than theirs. What has made it so? 
We should therefore suppose that the Roman Catholic 
hierarchy would do its best to make our free schools 
influential to lift up these illiterate and teach them 
to read, as it has our native population. On the con- 
trary, while Rome furnishes us a very large prepon- 
derance of our illiterates, she is the only force in these 
United States that openly, defiantly, and continuously 
fights our free schools. (Applause.) The only one ! 

She says America is hers, puts forth the most 
strenuous efforts to grasp and to hold it; but if I 
understand the truth, the church whose relation to 
the liquor traffic is too largely of toleration and com- 



26 Religion and the Nation. 

plaisance, if not positive support ; whose relation to 
undesirable immigration is such that she to a great 
extent monopolizes it ; whose relation to bad munici- 
pal politics is such that she has to be allowed a most 
disgraceful prominence ; whose relation to illiteracy is 
such that she furnishes most of the illiterate immi- 
grants, and at the same time she alone antagonizes 
the free common schools, which are the only agency 
that ever made the common people able to read, — I 
say, when I hear her claim, and note the facts, I pro- 
test that this papal church is not good enough to 
control America. (Continued applause.) 



.^ 



COLUMBUS AND AMERICA. 



"Beware of false prophets." So speaks our 
Lord, in Matthew 7th chapter, 15th verse. 

"Beware of false prophets." Why? Because 
they tell lies. Because they tell lies in the name of 
religion and of God; for the office of the prophet is 
to speak forth and teach the word of God. No man 
can do as much harm as he who utters falsehood in 
the name of religion, for thereby he appeals to the 
highest, most responsive sense in humanity, namely 
their religious sense ; and if through this they are 
deceived, men are carried farther astray than by any 
other faculty or teacher. Therefore Christ, knowing 
that the greatest possible disaster comes through 
religious teachers who, in the name of God, wilfully 
state what is false, warns people in that age, and in 
every age, to beware of them. 

Scarcely less should we beware of those who tell 
us falsehood as though it were history, who looking 
backward, as the prophet looks forward, recite as 
though it were fact, romance and fiction as the annals 
of a past time. For the history of past times is 
highly important as teaching us how to live in the 
present; and of all the gifts of God to human intel- 
ligence, few are more useful than a knowledge of 

27 



28 Columhus and America. 

the past. Great deeds of former centuries thrill us, 
in our own age. The patriot of to-day fights his 
country's battles with Leonidas in the pass of Ther- 
mopylae, with Charles Martel on the fields of France, 
with the heroes of Bunker Hill and the defenders of 
Lucknow. The Christian starts and thrills again as 
he seems to stand beside Stephen defying the council, 
Paul before Agrippa, Savonarola before the tyrants 
of Florence, intrepid Luther in the Diet of Worms, 
or Cranmer at the stake holding his right hand in 
the fire. 

So important is truthful history in the inspiratioD 
which it gives to us of the present time, that false 
allegations, told as though they were history, may 
lead a nation and a generation astray. Everywhere 
the Old Testament lays great stress on the impor- 
tance of Israel's past history as a corrective and 
guide of their present conduct and policy. That 
keen observer and great statesman, Bismarck, is often 
quoted as saying that the saddest thing he saw in 
France in 1870, was the false teaching of history in 
the schools of France by clerical teachers, because 
he knew that it was but sowing dragons' teeth, which 
would in the end bring sorrow to a nation. 

There are people who are afraid of true history; 
and when you find any so afraid, it is because they 
are consciously building on falsehood, and are afraid 
the error will be disclosed. The struggle in the 
Boston public schools over Swinton's history was 
ominous of the great fact that clerical usurpation, 
like civil usurpation, cannot stand on truthful his- 
tory, and is always afraid to have it taught. This 



Papal Claims and Historic Fact. 29 

is the chief reason why history is not taught in the 
national schools of Ireland, and accounts for the 
clerical protest against it. 

In presenting to you for your consideration state- 
ments which are to no small degree historical, I am 
moved thereto by the claims of certain representa- 
tives of Papal Rome, who, in considering the dis- 
covery of this country by Columbus, base on that 
discovery claims which are false in history and false 
in their forecast. And this I undertake to do 
because I do not know who will tell you unless I do 
here, to beware of these false prophets who are en- 
deavoring to subvert the future of America by invent- 
ing a false history of her past. 

We are in the four hundredth year since Christo- 
pher Columbus sailed from Palos and discovered the 
little island of San Salvador, and afterwards the 
larger islands of the West India group. Already 
this great historical event has taken a fresh hold 
upon the public mind, and is stirring popular senti- 
ment. Recently this platform has been occupied by 
those who have lauded and honored the illustrious 
name of Columbus. Already the nations have inter- 
changed courtesies with reference to celebrating the 
finding of the New World; and we of the United 
States have named what promises to be the greatest 
of all the exhibitions of human art and handicraft in 
the history of mankind, the Columbian Exhibition. 
So important is this fourth centennial, and so great 
is the notice which it attracts, that it cannot fail to 
have a powerful influence upon the sentiments of our 
population and upon the history of our nation. 



30 Columbus and America. 



I. Romanist Claims. 



On the fact that Christopher Columbus was a 
Roman Catholic have been based, by certain of his 
co-religionists, some very extraordinary claims. 

1. We have been told that he was a pious Catholic, 
and that his crew were Roman Catholics, that the 
sovereigns who favored his expedition %ere Roman 
Catholics, that he came here for the planting of that 
faith, and that he here celebrated the rites of that 
form of worship. In connection with these state- 
ments we are further told that the cause and reason 
of the finding of the New World, and of ' all its sub- 
sequent great development, was Catholicity, that is, 
the Roman Catholic system. We have further been 
told that the consequences which have followed from 
the discovery of the New World and the founding 
of this great Republic of the west, are due entirely 
to Catholicity, as they call Romanism, and the in- 
ference has further been drawn, that because of these 
alleged facts, the Roman Catholic religion has cer- 
tain rights in this country which no other religion 
has, and that by right it ought to control our terri- 
tory and our people, because that territory was origi- 
nally discovered by the representatives of that faith. 
That you may see that I have not overstated these 
claims in the slightest degree, I shall quote from 
an eminent representative of the Roman Catholic 
Church, his exact words, delivered under such cir- 
cumstances as to have received practically the in- 



Papal Claims and Historic Fact. 31 

dorsement of the whole Roman Catholic Church in 
this country. 

2. In November of the year 1889, at the Congress 
of the Roman Catholic Church held to celebrate its 
centennial in the city of Baltimore, where the prin- 
cipal prelates and most distinguished laymen of that 
church were present, Daniel Dougherty, Esq., known 
throughout this country as a brilliant and eloquent 
orator, made a speech by invitation, in the presence 
of the Congress, which received their fullest indorse- 
ment. Mr» Dougherty not only uttered the senti- 
ments above outlined (which I am about to quote 
from the memorial volume published by the Roman 
Catholics on that occasion), but in the midst of the 
greatest enthusiasm, after he had spoken, he received 
a vote of thanks from the assembly. You therefore 
see that they practically adopted his words as their 
own. Mr. Dougherty says, " The shadow of an im- 
posing event begins to move. The people of the 
United States, ay of the hemisphere, are about to 
celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of 
America. We heartily rejoice in this resolve. That 
tremendous event, — with reverence I may say the 
second creation, — the finding of a new world, and 
the vast results that have flowed to humanity, can be 
traced directly to the Roman Catholic Church, and 
the Roman Catholic Church alone. Protestantism 
was unknown when America was discovered. Let 
the students and scholars search the archives of Spain 
and the libraries of Europe, and the deeper the re- 
search, the more glory will adorn the brow of Catho- 
licity. It was a pious Catholic who conceived the 



32 Columbus and America. 

mighty thought. It was when foot-sore and down- 
hearted at the porch of a monastery, that hope dawned 
on him. It was a monk who first encouraged him. 
It was a cardinal who interceded with the sovereigns 
of Spain. It was a Catholic king who fitted out the 
ships. It was a Catholic queen who offered her 
jewels as a pledge. It was the Catholic Columbus 
and a Catholic crew that sailed out upon an unknown 
sea, where ship had never sailed before. It was to 
spread the Catholic faith that the sublime risk was 
run. It was the hymn to the blessed mother that 
each night closed the perils of the day and inspired 
with hope the morrow. It was the holy cross, the 
emblem of Catholicity, that was carried to the shore 
and planted on the new-found world. It was the 
holy sacrifice of the mass that was the first, and for 
long years the only Christian worship on this con- 
tinent. . . . Why, the broad seal of the Catholic 
Church is stamped forever upon the four corners of 
the continent! " 

3. For these statements and these claims, with 
more like them, and equally felicitous in expression, 
Mr. Dougherty received the thanks of the Congress. 

Moreover, the Roman Catholic papers with which 
I am familiar, for the last year have reiterated over 
and over again the same declarations, claiming that 
Romanism deserves the glory for the finding and 
founding of this continent, and that it therefore has 
superior rights of recognition and control. Their 
design is evidently to impress the millions who fol- 
low their standard, not only with the greatness of 
their church and their system but also that they have 



Papal Claims and Historic Facts. 33 

the right of dominating the territory and the peoples 
of this nation. It is, therefore, eminently desirable 
that we should get a full and correct idea of the 
history to which they refer. In the spirit of the 
best historical writing which is now coming into 
vogue, which is properly supplanting the romance 
that is sometimes substituted for history, and by the 
aid of the latest searchers of the original sources of 
information and truth, I undertake to analyze, and I 
may so far premise as to say dispute, the statements 
above made, and the inferences drawn by the Papacy 
and its representatives. 

II. Claims Reviewed. 

Let us contrast with the facts, the statements of 
the orator which have been read in your hearing. 

1. I might say, however, before that contrast is 
begun, that if all that Mr. Dougherty said were 
proven true, I cannot see that the just inference 
would be that the Roman Catholic Church of right 
ought to control this country. Suppose we should 
say that some hundreds of years ago the Toltecs occu- 
pied Mexico, and that portion of territory now known 
as New Mexico, in our own country : then that the 
Aztecs, another race, came down from the north and 
discovered the Toltec country; therefore, by right, 
the Aztecs and their descendants forever ought to 
rule over the land which they discovered. Would 
that be good reasoning ? I think not. And yet the 
Aztec civilization in Mexico was of an order to rival 
that which was brought thither by Cortez and the 



34 Columbus and America, 

Spanish Roman Catholics, after the discovery of 
America by Columbus. 

2. Mr. Dougherty says that all the glory of this 
country can be traced directly to Catholicity and the 
Roman Catholic Church, and to the Roman Catholic 
Church alone. Now, I should like to inquire what 
in the Roman Catholic Church it was that inspired 
Columbus, whether it was their polity or their faith? 
And studying the institutions that have grown up in 
this country, I beg to ask whether our free civil con- 
stitution sprang out of the Roman Catholic Church, 
either its polity or its faith? Where is there any 
analogy to the free constitution of this republic in 
any of the doctrines or any portion of the polity of 
the Roman Catholic Church? If we, a republic of 
such magnitude, have been born of the Roman Catho- 
lic faith, it is marvellously strange that no other 
republic in all history was ever born of that church. 
Every effort of the South American and Mexican 
peoples to become free republics she has opposed, 
and the Roman Catholic Church to-day is the most 
dangerous foe of 'those republics, and of our own, 
though they claim that she gave them birth. 

3. And what idea of Christopher Columbus did 
we owe to the Roman Catholic Church ? He believed 
that there was a passage westward to Asia, but that 
belief was shared by Aristotle and Strabo and Seneca 
two hundred years,^»d more before the Christian era. 
He believed thit the world was round, and yet we 
find the Pythagoreans teaching that the world was 
round, six centuries before Christ. We find that 
Aristotle taught it four centuries before Christ. We 



Papal Claims and Historic Facts. 35 

find that Oicero the orator, van d Pliny the historian, 
and Ovid and Virgil the poets, of an era contempo- 
raneous with the birth of Christ, all believed that 
the earth was round. We find, moreover, that two 
hundred years before the Christian era. Crates formed 
a globe ten feet in diameter, to show the sphericity 
of the earth. Now, I do not suppose that even Mr. 
Dougherty T^ould claim Aristotle and Pythagoras 
and Cicero, Pliny and Ovid and Virgil, Crates and 
Seneca, as Roman Catholics. Perhaps that is a little 
beyond even his extraordinary power as a claimant. 

4. He says that Protestantism at that time, that 
is, in 1492, was totally unkriowh. It is a fashion for 
Roman Catholics to say that Protestantism had its 
birth at the time of Martin Lutfier; and if they de- 
finie Protestantism as beginning with Martin Luther, 
of course they will have to say that, there was none 
before. But surely the apostolic church was not 
Roman Catholic, and most surely from the beginning 
of its usurpations until now, there have been mil- 
lions who have entered their protest against the as- 
sumptions of the Papacy. " Where was your church 
before the days of Luther? " asked a Pq.pist of a Prot- 
estant. "Where yours is not now, in the word of 
God," was the ready answer; ^and a truthful answer 
it was. The assertion of Mr. Dougherty and Roman 
Catholics that there was no Protestantism at or be- 
fore 1492 is monstrous in the ligl|t of history. 

In 1329 the people of the city of Frankfort-on-the- 
Oder resisted the Papacy and their ecclesiastics, 
until they were put under the ban of excommunica- 
tion for twenty-eight years. Were they not Protes- 



36 Columbus and America. 

tants? Abelard and the University of Paris two 
centuries before that entered their protest against the 
usurpation of Home, both in theology and govern- 
ment. The Waldenses, named from Peter Waldo, 
who died in 1179, have always been the objects of 
Roman Catholic hatred and persecution, as was their 
founder, because of their love of a purer faith. 
Surely 1170 is somewhat earlier than 1492. Wick- 
liffe, "the morning star of the Reformation," was 
born in 1324, and was sufficiently obnoxious to the 
Roman Catholic Church, so that a hundred years 
afterward, in 1428, the ashes of this man who loved 
the Bible and hated the Pope were not permitted to 
rest in their grave, but were taken up by priests, and 
scattered in the river Swift, thence passing by the 
Avon and the Severn to the sea. Was this indig- 
nity put upon his remains because he was a Roman- 
ist or a Protestant? Chancellor Gerson, a great light 
of the Middle Ages, one of the greatest names in the 
history of France, struck with all his might against 
the errors and assumptions of the Papacy. Savona- 
rola uttered his protest in Florence, and was burned 
in 1475, seventeen years before Columbus discovered 
America: he was the representative of a very large 
following. (There might have been more Protes- 
tants in those times if there had been fewer inquisi- 
tions, dungeons, and stakes.) Dr. John Lallier of 
the Sorbonne, a man of most distinguished ability, 
gave his utterance against the Papacy in 1475, and 
was burned in 1498 for stating: what he did. I wish 
I had time to read you all that he said. Let. me 
read a few words: "All the clergy have received 



Papal Claims and Historic Fact. 37 

equal power from Christ. The Roman Church is 
not the head of other churches. You should keep 
the commandment of God and of the apostles; and 
as for the commandments of bishops and all the 
other lords of the Church, they are but straw. They 
have ruined the Church by their crafty devices. The 
priests of the Eastern Church sin not by marrying, 
and I believe that in the Western Church we should 
not sin were we also to marry." Is that Papist or 
Protestant doctrine? But this man was turned to 
ashes in 1498 by the fires of Papal Rome. John 
of Wesalia died in a dungeon because he uttered 
his sentiments concerning Rome in the following 
manner: "He whom God is willing to save by the 
gift of his grace will be saved, though all the priests 
in the world should wish to condemn and excom- 
municate him. And he whom God will condemn, 
though all should wish to save him, will neverthe- 
less be condemned." Is that a Roman Catholic or 
a Protestant declaration? John Wessel, who, on 
account of his great learning, was called the " Light 
of the World," born probably in 1400, long before 
the time of Columbus, gave utterance to sentiments 
even stronger than these when he says, "Nothing 
is more effectual to the destruction of the Church 
than a corrupted clergy. All Christians, even the 
humblest and most simple, are bound to resist those 
who are destroying the Church. We must obey the 
precepts of doctors and of prelates only according 
to the measure laid down by St. Paul (1 Thess. v. 
21), that is to say, so far as 'sitting in Moses's seat,' 
they teach according to Moses." And he utters 



38 Columbus and America. 

another sentiment which I must read. Hear him: 
"The Popes may err. All human satisfactions are 
blasphemy against Christ, who has reconciled and 
completely justified the human race. To God alone 
belongs the power of giving plenary absolution. It 
is not necessary to confess our sins to the priest. 
There is no purgatory unless it be God himself, 
who is a devouring fire, and who cleanseth from all 
impurity." 

All this antedates Columbus. So also Bohemians 
had sent missionaries before the discovery of Amer- 
ica, into many countries of Europe to carry the doc- 
trines of Wickliffe. The Protestants in many lands 
out-numbered the Papists, and in those lands the 
inquisition had no force, while the Greek or Byzan- 
tine Church, and the old Armenian Church, a little 
farther east, never bowed their neck to Rome, even 
when monarchs undertook to force them to do so. 

These are but a few of hundreds of facts of history 
concerning" the Christians who have withstood Rome. 
In view of these, when a speaker, in the presence of 
an intelligent American audience, says that there 
were no Prostestants and no Protestantism prior to 
1492, either he does not know history, or else he 
intentionally deceives. It is true that there was 
always the most determined effort on the part of 
Rome to crush by her tyranny and persecutions those 
who protested against her: it is true that the stake 
and the flame were everywhere. John Huss was 
burned in Constance in 1415,- so was Jerome, soon 
afterward. I have stood beside their monuments, 
where they were tortured to death by the Romish 



Papal Claims and Historic Fact. 39 

Council of Constance seventy-five years before Co- 
lumbus discovered America. Is Romanism Christian 
which deals thus with preachers of a pure Gospel? 
Nay. Nor could she, even with the bigoted fierce- 
ness of past or present times, suppress the truth 
which she hated. 

5. Columbus, says the orator, was a pious Catho- 
lic. That is true: he was. He desired a crusade: 
said he was going to get wealth in the New World 
in order to carry on a crusade in the Holy Land ; 
and in the latter part of his life he claimed to 
be inspired, and -to be fulfilling the vision of the 
apocalypse as one whom God had sent to take the 
Holy Sepulchre. 

6. He says that a monk befriended him (at the 
monastery of Santa Maria de la Rabida). That is 
true ; but it is also true that many men went into 
monasteries m that time in' order that, hidden from 
persecution, they might dare-to think without the 
likelihood of being slaughtered for their opinions; 
No doubt many a man of great ability sought refuge 
there in order to find quiet and to save his life. 

7. A Catholic queen, he says, pledged her jewels. 
This is a romantic invention, for history discredits 
it wholly, since her jewels were probably already 
pledged for the prosecution of the war against the 
Moors. 

8. He says it was a Catholic crew that sailed with ' 
Columbus. Perhaps you know the fact thafhe got 
many of his crew out of the prisons, because^ dther 
sailors would not embark. Nevertheless, I do*lbot 
know that being in prison is to their discredit, 



40 Columbus and America. 

because a good many most excellent men were put 
in prison in those days, by the Roman Catholic 
Church; and although these were prisoners, and 
came out of the penitentiaries that they might sail 
with Columbus, it does not follow that they were 
bad men. However, if they were good Catholics, 
then they were bad men, else they would not have 
got into jail ; if they were good men, it was because 
they were Protestants, and put in on account of 
their faith. (Applause.) 

9. He says that the purpose of Columbus was to 
spread the Catholic faith ; but as I read with extrem- 
est care the history of Columbus, I find that his cry 
everywhere is not for the conversion of the natives, 
but for gold — gold — gold. I hold in my hand an 
abstract given by Washington Irving, and repeated 
by Mr. Justin Winsor in his recent "Life of Colum- 
bus," of the agreement entered into by the sovereigns 
Ferdinand and Isabella on the one hand, and Chris- 
topher Columbus on the other. Not a word is said 
in it about the salvation or conversion of the natives: 
it is all about the honors which Columbus shall ac- 
quire, the proportionate part of the treasure that he 
shall have and that the monarchs must receive as a 
return for his possible discoveries. I will not stop 
to read, for fear of wearying your patience, the four 
distinct statements to the above effect which are 
made in this agreement. 

When the New World was found, everywhere the 
cry of Columbus and the men with him was for gold ; 
so that, as says Benzoni, the contemporary historian 
of the voyages, "at length the natives used to take 



Papal Claims and Historic Fact. 41 

up a piece of gold and cry, 'Behold the Christians' 
God. '" This was the idea which they received of the 
piety of Columbus and his followers. When Colum- 
bus undertook to place on the neck of a chief in the 
West India Islands the cross as the sign of the 
Christian faith, this poor man had seen so much of 
the cruelty of the Spaniard, that he declined to take 
it, on the ground that it represented tyranny and 
cruelty. Such was the idea the natives received of 
the faith of the explorers and conquerors. 

Thus all the statements of the distinguished ora- 
tor, before the Catholic Congress, I have passed in 
review, and you see in the light of history about how 
much truth there is in them. Only the least impor- 
tant of his allegations are facts. 

But let me proceed to his claims and inferences 
with farther facts. 

III. Rome desiees the Entire Ceedit and Re- 
sponsibility OF what Coluivibus was. 

This is their demand: Catholicity did it all they 
say. Catholicity made him what he was, therefore 
Catholicity is responsible for all that he was. Very 
good, so be it. What was he? that is the question. 
Now I am going to tell you some facts from his 
biography. 

1. Before he came to Portugal, his history is 
uncertain. But in 1484 Columbus married in that 
country a woman of excellent character, so far as we 
know, whose father and grandfather were persons of 
some distinction. Columbus deserted this woman 



42 Columbus and America. 

and her- children, taking with him only one of them, 
his son' Diego, when he went to Seville. He never 
saw her again, and did nothing for her support. 
He himself says, if his own word can be trusted, m 
a letter which he wrote in the latter part of his life, 
as much as I have just now stated. 

2. He barely escaped arrest at the frontier, when 
he left Portugal, because of some unknown crimes 
which he had committed. What those offences were 
we cannot tell; but we do know that the king of 
Portugal on the 20th of March, 1488, wrote him a 
letter saying that if he would come back, the crimes 
of which he was guilty would not be charged against 
him, whatever they were. In 1487 Columbus, the 
pious Catholic, took for a mistress Beatrix Enriquez, 
and she bore him a son Ferdinand, who is one bi- 
ographer of his father. This woman also he shortly 
forsook and left without support. All that Colum- 
bus was, Mr. Dougherty says, is due to Catholicity, 
and all that he did sprang from that Church. Let 
us inquire farther. 

3. A reward of ten thousand maravedis and a 
silken jacket was promised to the man that should 
first discover land on the earliest voyage of Colum- 
bus. It is the opinion of the most careful biogra- 
phers and historians, that land was first discovered 
by a poor sailor, and that Columbus claimed and 
took the reward, in violation of every principle of 
honesty. Moreover, it is in harmony with the well- 
known avarice and cupidity of Christopher Columbus 
that he should )io that very thing. There is a pain- 
ful story of the poor sailor who was cheated of the 



Papal Claims and Historic Fact. 43 

deserved reward, that lie afterwards joined the Mo- 
Kammedans, hoping to find in the followers of the 
f^lse prophet a degree of honor that he had failed to 
find in the followers of the Pope. (Applause.) All 
tha^ Columbus was, he was made by Catholicity, says 
the fcatholic Congress, indorsing its orator. 

4. But he had scarcely landed in the West Indies, 
before he proposed to enslave the natives of those 
unfortunate islands. Queen Isabella was somewhat 
opposed to this, and resisted it for a time ; but it was 
not long, because enslavement was urged again and 
again in the letters of Columbus, before five hun- 
dred of those natives were sent as slaves to Spain. 
He sent five ship-loads at various times, and was the 
father of the slave-trade in North America. Untold 
horror and inhumanity resulted, carrying with them 
an awful infamy for Columbus. To prove that 
Catholicity did it, such were the sentiments of his 
time, that Las Casas, a noble Roman Catholic priest 
of great humanity and of true piety, says that' the 
priests, the large share of them, and the most promi- 
nent, were in favor of the enslavement of the natives, 
and that they co-operated Avith Columbus in bringing 
it about. (Sensation.) 

5. Moreover, cruising along the southern coast 
of the island of Cuba, Columbus took it into his 
head (he was a man of extraordinary imagination) 
that he would assert that he had found the continent 
of Asia, and he therefore compelled all his sailors 
and officers to swear that they had sebn the conti- 
nent of Asia, under the following penalty: if the 
sailors ever denied that it was the fact, they were to 



44 Columbus and America. 

have their tongues torn out, and if the officers denied 
it, they were to be fined ten thousand maravedis 
apiece. That is to say, Columbus, the pious Catlio- 
lic, compelled his officers and sailors to make affi- 
davit to a lie, under the most horrible penalties, and 
so sent word home, when he was on the south side of 
the island of Cuba, that he had found Asia. Catho- 
licity has all the credit of Columbus and his deeds, 
does it? If they had claimed less, they would have 
shown greater wisdom. 

6. Furthermore, it is a well-known fact that Co- 
lumbus was extremely cruel. His cruelty destroyed 
the lives of a third of the inhabitants of San Dom- 
ingo in two years. The first vicar apostolic, an 
officer of the Roman Catholic Church, who was sent 
out to the West Indies in the interests of religion, 
could not endure Columbus's cruelty to the natives, 
and left and went home for that reason. Put it on 
record as he did. 

It was Columbus who, in order to get gold, com- 
pelled the forced service of these poor people in the 
mines, a forced service, known in Spanish phrase as 
repartimientos^ concerning which the best historians 
say it wrought the utmost degradation and ruin 
upon those unfortunate inhabitants. Even the poor 
natives reproved Columbus for his cruelty; and at 
length, to show the extraordinary dishonesty of the 
man who certainly had some great excellences, the 
Admiral defrauded the king and queen of Spain 
out of part of what he had promised them, giving as 
the flimsy excuse, that he did not tell them about the 
pearls which he had, because he wanted to wait until 



Papal Claims and Historic Fact. 45 

he had more gold. This they did not seem to find 
an altogether satisfactory excuse, and the sons of 
Columbus were hooted in the street because of the 
dishonesty of their father. 

7. To speak according to history, not according to 
the romantic ideas of Mr. Dougherty, when Mr. 
Justin Winsor, the librarian of Harvard College, 
sums up the life of Columbus in a very extraordinary 
paragraph, in a history of vast research and compre- 
hensiveness, he says, " We have seen a pitiable man 
meet a pitiable death. Hardly a name in profane 
history is more august than his: hardly another 
character in the world's record has made so little of 
its opportunities. His discovery was a blunder: 
his blunder was a new world : the New World is his 
monument. Its discoverer might have been its 
father: he proved to be its despoiler. He might 
have given its young days such a benignity as the 
world likes to associate with a maker: he left it a 
legacy of devastation and crime. He might have 
been an unselfish promoter of geographical science : 
he proved a rabid seeker for gold and a vice-royalty. 
He might have won converts to the fold of Christ 
by the kindness of his spirit: he gained the execra- 
tions of the good angels. He might, like Las Casas, 
have rebuked the fiendishness of his contemporaries: 
he set them an example of perverted belief. The 
triumph of Barcelona led down to the ignominy of 
Valladolid, with every step in the degradation pal- 
pable and resultant." And yet of all this Mr. 
Dougherty, the Congress, and the Roman Catholic 
papers, affirm that " Catholicity " deserves the sole 



46 Columbus and America, 

credit. Let them have it, if they insist on , so 
doing. 

8. Catholicity has all the credit, furthermore, of 
Ferdinand and Isabella, and Ferdinand and Isabella 
founded and favored the Inquisition in Spain. It 
must have the credit of all that was done at that 
time, because there were no Protestants then, at least 
none to found an Inquisition. From 1481 to 1498, 
Torquemada, the chief inquisitor of Spain, burned 
eight thousand people at the stake, by the direct 
command of that great cardinal whom Mr. Dough- 
erty praises, called " the third king " of Spain, the 
Cardinal Mendoza. If eight thousand were burned, 
how many, perished in dungeons, how many died a 
wrelfched death, torn from their homes, despoiled of 
theifi fortunes, tortured and starved? All this he 
claims too, and we will admit the claim, if he still 
wishes to make it. 

But does Rome deny the responsibility of the dis- 
honorable and immoral deeds of Columbus? Does 
she deny the responsibility for the founding of the 
Inquisition? Does she deny the deeds of Torque- 
mada in Spain? Then if she does deny it, and it 
will be to her credit if she does, notwithstanding 
the rash claims of her prelates and orators, if she 
does deny it, let her not claim that Rome has vastly 
superior rights to all others in this country because 
these pious Catholics discovered one of the West 
India Islands. (Applause.) 



Papal Claims and Historic Fact. 47 

IV. Now FOR A Few Facts about the Dis- 
covery OF America. 

I do not propose to enter upon even a sketch of the 
life of Columbus. I have designed only to bring 
facts to bear upon the great claims which are made 
for him. It was an age of brave sailors, of awaken- 
ing intellect, an age when art and science and true 
religion may have been said to have had their new 
birth. There were navigators before Columbus as 
daring as he : there were others, his contemporaries, 
no less so, among the Portuguese, the Genoese, 
the Welsh, the English, and the Spanish. Columbus 
sailed from Palos on the 3d of August, 1492, and 
discovered, on the 12th of October of the same year, 
it is believed. Cat Island, now called San Salvador. 
He never saw the continent. of North America. So, 
if discovery gives the right of domination, what 
right grows out of his discovery so far as these 
United States are concerned? He did not discover 
the continent of America until after an English- 
man, or rather a Florentine sailing under the Eng- 
lish flag, had done it; for we know that Columbus 
discovered the continent of South America on the 
2d of August, 1498, when John Cabot, sailing 
under the English flag, had discovered the continent 
of North America on the 24th of June, 1497. I have 
no desire whatever to detract from the real and just 
fame of Columbus ; but as a matter of fact the great 
navigator never obtained any rights of discovery on 
the main land of North or South America, and if 



48 Columbus and America. 

Rome has any rights here, founded on anybody in 
the age of discovery, none of those rights can be 
founded upon Christopher Columbus. 

Who did discover the continent of North America ? 
Many very intelligent and able people in Boston 
combined to raise a monument to Lief Ericsson, who, 
they believe, discovered North America in the ninth 
century, about six hundred years before the time of 
Columbus. I do not know whether he did so or not, 
though I incline to believe that the weight of testi- 
mony favors the Norsemen. There are stories and 
traces out of which investigators construct such a 
probability. Moreover, a Welsh navigator, Madoc 
by name, took a colony to the west, and never came 
back, in the twelfth century. And as I have already 
stated, the Cabots, John Cabot the father, and Sebas- 
tian the son, discovered North America on the 24th 
of June, 1497, which was more than a year before 
Columbus found the mouth of the Orinoco in the 
northern part of South America. 

I said at the beginning, that it seemed all impor- 
tant at a time like this that whatever strength there 
is in history should stand for the truth as against 
false claims. The false prophets get all their stand- 
ing from being false historians. They invoke reli- 
gion both for the past and the future. But religion 
cannot sanctify falsehood. Is there not something 
astounding in the fact that at a Congress represent- 
ing the Roman Catholic Church her great preacher, 
Archbishop Ireland, should face the Protestants of 
this land and the world Avith the deliberate declara- 
tion that " As a religious system Protestantism is in 



Papal Claims and Historic Fact. 4l9' 

hopeless dissolution, utterly valueless as a doctrinal, 
or moral power ; " that her silver-tongued orator 
should assert as fact that "American Roman Catho- 
lics have silently submitted to wrongs and injustices 
and outrages in manifold shapes from time imme- 
morial ; " that again and again prelates and laymen 
should affirm that we owe about all our civilization 
to the Jesuit fathers. But it was thus that the twelve 
hundred members of this Congress recorded them- 
selves. Do we not well to consider the words of our 
Lord? 

Let me now say in closing : this country has been 
known to Europeans since the discovery by Colum- 
bus of the West India Islands in 1492. All that 
part that he had direct relations to, namely the West 
Indies and Brazil, and the northern part of South 
America, have had a history ever since, far different 
from that of the United States of North America. 
The Spaniard in America has not figured as a bene- 
factor, whether we follow Cortez in Mexico, where 
he supplanted a false religion by a religion scarcely 
less cruel, or Pizarro in Peru, where rnuch the 
same was true, — the religion of the Incas being 
better than the religion of Pizarro, less bloody, less 
cruel, less a curse to mankind, — while the Spaniards 
in Florida were as little benefactors as were those in 
the West Indies, in Mexico, and in South America. 

In October, 1492, two days or so before Columbus 
saw land, the prow of his vessel being turned by the 
Gulf Stream current somewhat to the northward, he 
was bearing on in a direction that would have 
brought him to the Carolina coast. His brave and 



50 Columbus and America. 

experienced lieutenant, Pinzon, seeing a flock of 
parrots flying southward, begged Columbus, who 
was in great uncertainty, to turn his vessel's course 
to the south-west. Columbus yielded to his protes- 
tations, and bore away to the southward. Thus, in 
the order of an infinitely wise Providence, the Span- 
iard landed on the scattered islands of the West 
Indies, rather than on the virgin coast of the Caro- 
linas. Thus the inscrutable wisdom of Almighty 
God saved from Spanish devastation the land in 
which we live, saved it from the domination of an 
idolatrous and cruel religion. Thus infinite wis- 
dom, that on little pivots swings the doors of great 
centuries, mercifully diverted the Spanish fleet from 
the shores of our country, and left this virgin conti- 
nent to be found, upbuilt, and glorified by English 
Protestantism. (Applause.) 






SPANISH ROMANISM AND ENGLISH PROTESTANTISM 

ON THE WESTERN CONTINENT. 



I AM to speak to you this afternoon on Spanish 
Romanism and English Protestantism on the West- 
ern Continent. As from a hill-top one surve^^s 
through a glass the vast and varied landscape, so 
from the heights of history, through the glass of di- 
vine truth, I desire with you to survey one of the 
vastest of all the eras of national and religious life 
which has ever transpired upon this planet. That 
portion of the Holy Scriptures through which we 
shall look, consists of two rej)resentative statements, 
the one made by the statesman-prophet Daniel, the 
other by the unequalled apostle to the Gentiles. 
In the 4th chapter of Daniel's prophecy and the 
l7th verse, addressing Nebuchadnezzar, he says, 
" To the intent that the living may know that the 
Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giv- 
eth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it 
the basest of men." The passage from the apostle 
to the Gentiles is where, in the Acts of the Apostles, 
xvii. 26, addressing the Athenians, he says, " God 
hath made of one blood all nations to dwell on the 
face of the earth, and hath determined the times 

51 



52 Spanish Romanism cmd English Protestantism 

before appointed, and the bounds of their habita- 
tion." 

1. The doctrine taught by the prophet Daniel is 
that whatever the eddies or the currents of human 
history, God is supreme overall, and that sometimes, 
in the order of his providence, he permits nations to 
set up over them the basest of rulers, in order that 
by their experience Avith bad rulers and bad laws 
they may learn thus not to try the experiment again, 
and that unrighteousness is not for the advantage of 
any people ; as he permitted the Israelites to set up 
Saul as king, for which they had occasion always 
to be sorry: so, says Daniel, the supreme ruler of 
men and nations, who taketh up the isles as a very 
little thing, and counts "the nations as the small 
dust of the balance," raises up to supreme places, at 
times, me nof ignoble character, that He may teach 
through them, to all coming generations, how futile 
it is to attempt by unrighteousness to prosper either 
nations or men . While St. Paul, in harmony with 
what I said to you on last Sunday, surveying the 
providential placing of men in all portions of the 
earth, says, if I may paraphrase. These people are 
not here by chance: they have not been placed in 
their various geographical locations by accident; but 
that God who made the unity of men perfect in their 
original creation, has prescribed a diversity of zones 
and lands and shores where they may work out the 
experiment of civilization to the boundaries of their 
habitations, in order that by drawing lines along 
these boundaries, men, in studying nations, may see 
how infinitely superior some are to others, and may 



On the Western Continent. 53 

then inquire the reason for such inequality, for the 
better regulation of their constitutions, their politics, 
and their conduct. 

2. The vast movements of God's providence are 
as well worth studying as the small. A man who 
calls himself a Christian, with grave and solemn 
visage reproving me, said on last Monday, "Why 
didn't you preach Christ on Sunday?" I said, 
"Were you there on Sunday night? Then my 
discourse was all concerning Christ." He said, 
"No; but I didn't think you preached Christ on 
Sunday afternoon." I suppose all the use that man 
has for Christ is to have Him wait on him (laugh- 
ter), but my thought of Christ is that he is the King 
of nations, the Son of God clothed with power, and 
that I preach Christ when I point to his footsteps in 
history, as much as when I point to his footsteps in 
your house or in your heart. On a nation, which 
God regards as a very little thing, he looks with the 
same grace or the same wrath as on a man; and 
taking a whole continent for the arena, taking na- 
tions and races as the characters, taking centuries as 
the time, and colossal national results as the conse- 
quences, I desire to-day, in your presence, to review 
the workings of the two great systems of religion 
that are disputing for precedence in this country, 
that you may clearly and judicially decide which of 
them should control and have the right of way. 

3. The arena is a continent, the Western Conti- 
nent. Did you ever think that on this Western 
Continent, like a jewelled girdle crossing its broad 
front, the United States of America is really the only 



54 Spanish Romanism and Engliah Protestantism 

prosperous nation among all its political divisions ? 
that all but English Canada are Roman Catholic, 
save only the United States of America; and that, 
without exception, apart from the United States of 
America, all these nations are abject and degraded ? 
Mexico, the states of Central America, Brazil, the 
United States of Colombia, Peru, Chili, Argentina, 
Uruguay, — there you have all the rest of the conti- 
nent, save that which lies to the north of us, which 
is half Protestant, half Papist; while in the face of 
angels and men is thrust through the geographical 
centre of North America a free Protestant republic, 
to show the world the contrast between Romanism and 
Protestantism. (Applause.) 

I. The conditions under which this vast test of 
religions was tried are of the most thrilling charac- 
ter. The period following 1492, when Columbus 
discovered San Salvador, was the period of coloni- 
zation in this country: abroad it was a period of 
astonishing revolution and agitation. 

1. From 1492, one hundred and fifty years being 
counted, you have movements in Europe of the great- 
est magnitude. Shakspeare and Tasso among the 
poets ; Henry the Eighth, Charles the Fifth, Philip 
the Second, and Elizabeth among the rulers; Luther, 
Calvin, and Zwinglius among the reformers, are a 
few of its personages. The Spanish people, at the 
time of the discovery of America, and for quite a 
time later, were the leading people of Europe; a 
powerful, proud, bold race, not inferior in any re- 
spect, so far as I know, to any race on the continent. 
The Jews had brought their enterprise, and the 



On the Western Continent. 55 

Moors their culture to Spain ; and though they were 
driven out with fire and sword, and were fiercely- 
tortured by the Inquisition, the Spanish Empire was 
mighty, almost dominant. 

2. Romanism, in the early part of the sixteenth 
century, and in the last part of the fifteenth, was 
practically in full control of Europe. She had 
everything her own way : its monarchs were her ser- 
vants ; her will was the law of states ; the popes were 
the arbiters of nations. St. Peter's church was just 
begun. The Pope wanted money for it, and all 
Europe was taxed to furnish the same. The sellers 
of indulgences had gone into the Germanic and all 
other states in Europe, and the sale of indulgences 
was as much a business as the sale of wheat or cloth. 
One-third of the revenues of Germany was poured 
over the Alps into the lap of the Pope, and riches 
and splendor abounded in the palaces of the bishops 
and prelates, while poverty prevailed among the 
ranks of the people. 

3. Luther was born nine years before the discovery 
of America by Columbus. About the time when 
Cortez made the conquest of Mexico, Luther made 
the conquest of Germany, and the Reformation was 
in full swing. The massacre of St. Bartholomew 
occurred in 1572, scarce half a century before the 
pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The Dutch Republic 
rose and resisted the power of Philip II. and the 
Duke of Alva; won its liberty under the masterly 
direction of William the Silent, who in turn fell 
before the bullet of a Jesuit assassin. The Swiss 
Reformation convulsed that little republic, and laid 



56 Spanish Romanism and English P rotestantism 

the foundations of those Protestant states which 
from that time until this have been incomparably 
superior to all the other states of the Swiss confed- 
eration. Ignatius Loyola was born, the Jesuits were 
incorporated, and the counter reformation, deforma- 
tion I might say, was begun. The Inquisition 
flourished in Spain, as it had flourished in the Middle 
Ages in France and in Germany. 

4. Such is the merest suggestion of the vast events 
of which Europe was the theatre at the time when 
the Western Continent was discovered and colonized. 
This western world was unknown: its gates were 
just opening. At the mouth of its vast rivers the 
navigators saw such floods as to infer that they came 
from great distances and drained wide areas. The 
populations of the western world were scarcel}^ 
imagined, and were uncounted. Here were civili- 
zations in the north and in the south. The city of 
Mexico at that time was great and populous, having 
as is supposed sixty thousand householders. The 
Incas in Peru had already built cyclopean structures 
as great as any that the world has ever seen. There 
was civilization on this continent. The Five Na- 
tions in the Mohawk Valley of the State of New 
York had a barbarous form of life, but a na- 
tional unity and administration far removed above 
savagery. 

Here, then, is the arena for the great experiment. 
On this continent these European nations were to 
have an opportunity of testing their forms of faith 
and civilization. What a spectacle is this to look 
upon! Romanism, having the start, is to have a 



On the Western Continent. 67 

chance in North and South America over these 
wonderful lands, and with these pliable peoples, to 
show what she will make of them. And Bible 
Protestantism also is to have its opportunity at the 
same time. Spain stands, in the title of my dis- 
course, for other nations as well, which were strictly 
Romanist : for Portugal, which was foremost in dis- 
covery and colonization, for France also, which was 
scarcely behind ; while English Protestantism stands 
as well for the Protestantism of the Dutch, who 
were associated with the English, and the Swedes to 
the northward, who also had an important part in the 
colonization of this country. 

The experiment was made. Spain, France, Por- 
tugal, brought hither their institutions and colonized 
despotism, their cruel and their formal semi-pagan 
faith. The English, with the Dutch to help them, 
and the Swedes co-operating, colonized here ; estab- 
lishing constitutional liberty, biblical knowledge, 
pure morality, and freedom for man. 

II. I desire you to look with me for a moment at 
the conquest of this country, and the beginnings of 
this colonization. 

1. You cannot find, with the Spanish on the one 
hand, and the English on the other, any such differ- 
ences of race or nationality or climate as shall ac- 
count for the different results of their labors on this 
continent. The only possible way to account for 
the difference in what they brought to pass, is by the 
religious faith which dominated them. Spain, dis- 
covering the country first, had the first opportunity 
for colonization. 



58 Spanish Romanism and English Protestantism 

2. Let us look at ihe work of the Spanish Roman- 
ist in America. 

1. You know what Columbus did in the West 
Indies : you know that he became the ravisher and 
despoiler of the country, as I told you on last Sab- 
bath. He had hardly won the admiralty for which 
he struggled so long, before the daring Cortez, a 
Spaniard, was not only ready to follow but go be- 
yond him in the conquest of the New World. 
With a company of followers as hardy as their 
chief, he invaded Mexico, and having scuttled his 
ships at Vera Cruz, advanced toward the capital of 
that remarkable empire. In the year 1521, after a 
series of desperate encounters, the Montezumas 
yielded their throne to the Spaniards, and Cortez 
was master of the land. The Spanish found a 
people who dwelt in great houses and large commu- 
nities, who had a bloody religion, as cruel as that of 
the Spaniards themselves, and they supplanted the 
decapitation of the Aztec on the great pyramid, 
with the burning of the Aztec in the public square. 

Ten years later Pizarro, who was as brave as Cor- 
tez, had gone south to the domain of the Incas, and 
1530 or 1533 finds him practically master of the 
very centre of South America. There, in the midst 
of walls and houses and temples which have been the 
wonder of subsequent times, Pizarro arrested the 
lawful ruler of the country, promised him his liberty 
if he should furnish a large amount of gold, and at 
length, after receiving sixteen millions of money as 
the price of his ransom, treacherously betrayed him 
to death. 



On the Western Continent. 59 

2. The southern peoples to whom the Spaniards 
went were far superior to those of the north. Who- 
ever reads the history of the Aztec and the Inca 
civilization, knows full well that these people were 
somewhat civilized at least, and might, undoubtedly, 
from the gentleness of th ir manners and their sin- 
gular susceptibility to the influence of the white man, 
have become far superior to the North American 
Indian, under anything like a wise and kind policy. 
Such were the beginnings of Spanish conquest and 
colonization. 

3. The English came a century and a half later. 
Their first settlement was at Jamestown in 1607. 
A rather weak colony was this. They seemed to 
have but little idea of what they came for, except 
to find release from the burdens of the old world, 
and it was not long before they were divided by 
internal dissensions, and so decimated with various 
hardships that they hardly represented the spirit of 
English colonization. But 1620 saw another sight. 
On the rocky shores of Cape Cod, landed the men 
who brought the Holy Scriptures, the constitutional 
compact, and the purpose to have truth and right- 
eousness prevail wherever they had control. New 
York developed very shortly after, or may have been 
said to precede the Plymouth colony, in that the 
Dutch made their explorations about the year 1610, 
bringing from the fields of Holland the traditions 
of liberty which they had shared with the Pilgrims 
in Leyden, and the purpose to resist tyranny which 
had animated their great leader, William of Orange. 
The Quaker Penn, shortly after this, came to Penn- 



60 Spanish Romanism and English Protestantism 

sylvania and laid the foundations, in a peaceful pur- 
chase and a serene Christian faith, of the most pacific 
colony that was ever planted on North American 
shores. The Swedes, fresh from the wars in which 
they had been led by Gustavus Adolphus and his 
grandson Gustavus Vasa, both champions of Protes- 
tantism, had undertaken, also, to begin in Delaware 
and New Jersey a new state on the principles which 
they had inherited from Protestant traditions and 
struggles. Here on the one hand you see the Prot- 
estant in the hard and unfriendly north, on the other, 
the Spaniard in the genial and fruitful south, with 
their opportunities to work out the experiment for 
which they had come. Evidently the Spanish had 
the best chance : they had the earliest start, the finest 
country, were richest in minerals, and had the most 
civilized native populations. 

III. What principles did these two bring to the 
planting of America, principles of which we are now 
reaping the results? The fundamental ideas of the 
Spaniard and of the Englishman were the funda- 
mental ideas of Romanism and Protestantism. 

1. The Spaniard, catching the spirit of the popes, 
desired more than everything else, gold. Every- 
where this was his cry. For this he enslaved the 
natives and sold them in European markets ; for this 
he forced them into the mines where they perished 
miserably; for this he decimated the native popula- 
tions everywhere with fire and sword. Gold and 
silver were everywhere the Spaniard's cry. 

2. Then wherever he went he founded the Inqui- 
sition : that had been his engine of bigotry at home, 



On the Western Contiiient. 61 

and he set it up here in this land. There is not a 
capital in South America which is as old as Spanish 
colonization and rule, but what has Inquisition 
buildings ; while in the city of Mexico it is scarcely 
thirty years since these chambers of horrors were 
seized by the government and appropriated to the 
purposes of education. Three centuries that Inqui- 
sition prevailed, wherever the Spanish Romanist 
had dominion. By it he here burned men as they 
had burned them in Seville and Madrid. Forty- 
eight were burned at one time in the plaza of Mex- 
ico. One hundred were burned and thousands 
scourged for their faith in the Lima Inquisition by 
the Spanish Romanists. 
Romanists. 

3. They built costly churches, as Romanism builds 
everywhere. The people in hovels, the priests in 
palaces! The cathedral in Lima cost nine millions 
of dollars ; that in the capital of Honduras cost five 
millions of dollars. In the old Spanish American 
towns to-day, with their hovels all around them, are 
supported the most matchless church structures for 
splendor and for costliness to be found on this con- 
tinent. A single chandelier in a little Mexican 
church cost sixty thousand dollars, and the people 
who bought it, whose money bought it, earn twenty- 
five cents or less a day. The cathedral in Mexico 
was ninety years in building. Indulgences were 
everywhere sold. Masses were everywhere said. 
Priests were continually giving absolution. Con- 
fessions were being taken without ceasing. These 
were the fundamental ideas of the Spaniard, to 
which all but the lust of gold Avas subservient. 



^>2 Spanish Momanism and Eyiglish Protestantism 

4. What were the fundamental ideas of the Prot- 
estant English? Religion had its controlling place 
with them all and always, but it was a very different 
type of religion from that of the Spaniards. 

The religion of the English Protestant made 
him free. There are no Inquisition buildings in the 
United States. None were ever built by Dutchman 
or Swede or Englishman. Their religion did not 
embrace the idea of suppressing free opinion. The 
small amount of persecution on which so many of our 
liberal friends ring a hundred changes here in this 
State, when they scarcely raise their voice against 
the awful curse of Roman Catholic persecutions, — 
the little persecution in this State was as a drop to 
an ocean, compared with that which the Spanish 
Romanist everywhere forced upon the natives. I 
suggest that the people who have so much to say 
against the Puritans for their narrowness, folly, and 
bigotry in the small amount of persecution of which 
they were guilty in this country, should turn their 
attention to the real persecutors of the world, who 
have cursed by religious hate and torture every land 
on the face of the earth. (Applause.) Everywhere 
the English Protestant opened the free school. He 
built a church, but it was plain and comparatively 
poor. So humble were these structures that there is 
scarcely a Protestant church in this country which 
has survived the period of colonization . The people 
built homes, and then they built meeting-houses and 
schools. Everywhere there were schools for the com- 
mon people. Rome founded choice schools for the 
aristocrats: she trained some of the people to a very 



\ On the Western Continent. 63 

high point of culture, but the large majority of the 
common people were left in intellectual darkness. 

The English Protestant, instead of transporting 
the spirit of despotism to these shores, brought with 
him the idea of government by the people, and that 
such rule could only be properly exercised in con- 
nection with the diffusion of general intelligence. 
It is true that the curse of slavery was tolerated by 
these Protestant Englishmen, sad to say. But if 
you balance the slavery of the Romanist Spaniards 
over against the slavery of Protestant Englishmen, 
and so leave slavery out of the account, bad as it is, 
there remains an awful balance against the Roman 
Catholic religion and the Roman Catholic Spaniard 
in the lands of Central and South America. (Ap- 
plause.) 

IV. Thus were the seeds planted. These were 
the ideas laid down, these were the institutions 
begun, three centuries ago in this country, some of 
them longer ago than that. Down under the forms 
of national and social life these religious ideas began 
to take root. They have grown with the centuries, 
and what do they present us as their consequences 
to-day ? 

1. The Spanish colonies up to this very hour are 
the theatre of constant bloodv revolution. Where- 
fore ? Because the people are trying, as they have 
been trying for three hundred years, to throw off the 
tyranny whi^h was imposed upon them by the Span- 
iard. Everywhere, even this very month, the South 
American and Central American Republics are trem- 
bling under the convulsions of those struggles for 



64 Spanish Romanum and English Protestantism 

liberty which man can never forego, however abject 
his condition. In Mexico, that magnificent country, 
sixteen times as large as the State of New York, in 
the short space of sixty-two years there were fifty- 
two presidents, one emperor, and one regency, every 
one of which terminated with violence, with disorder, 
and with revolution. They know nothing of a stable 
government. Moreover, just as soon as . liberty gets 
a foothold, its strenuous and most intense enemy in 
all those countries is the Roman Catholic hierarchy. 
They foster and favor revolution and intrigue to 
create war, expecting to profit in the general con- 
fusion. To-day the greatest antagonist of the repub- 
lican government of Mexico is the archbishop of 
Mexico and his priests. We know that Rome 
fosters revolution. Tell me why the Pope of Rome 
alone, of all the rulers in this world, gave his hand to 
Jefferson Davis when the latter was trj- ing to break 
up this free republic? He was simply following 
out their policy everywhere and always. In this 
presidential year, perhaps because they like to print 
it, the papers are telling us that the Pope is growing 
liberal; and a prominent archbishop now in Rome, 
who wants very much, it is said, to be cardinal, tells 
us what a large public spirit now controls the Vati- 
can ; but a thousand years of history tell us to beware 
of the tiger's paw, however soft (applause), until we 
know that his claws have been cut off. (Great 
applause.) 

2. These people, the fruit of Spanish American 
colonization, are everywhere illiterate. There are 
not only very few free schools, but those which have 



On the Western Continent. 65 

been established have been planted in defiance of 
the continual opposition of the priests. For in- 
stance. Chili, with which Ave had a little unpleas- 
antness not long ago, and which is, except Argentina, 
perhaps the most prosperous nation in South America, 
Chili shows us one child in school out of twenty- 
five of her population. One person in seven only 
can read; only one person in eight can write. And 
Chili is, as I say, almost the brightest product of 
Spanish American civilization to the south of these 
United States. 

3. The immorality of the peoples in Spanish 
Roman Catholic countries is universally known. In 
Chili the legitimate births out of ninety thousand 
are only sixty-eight thousand, while between twenty- 
one and twenty-two thousand are illegitimate. In 
Ecuador seventy-five per cent of the children are 
born out of wedlock; and Ecuador is the most 
thoroughly under the control of the priests of any 
country in South America. What is the reason for 
this immorality? We are told that there are very 
few marriages there, for tbe reason that the charge 
made by the priests is so great that the people in 
their poverty cannot afford to have the ceremony 
performed; and j^et, wherever the governments have 
undertaken to introduce civil marriage so that by 
law poor people could be married and their children 
be born in wedlock, the governments have, in every 
case, been cursed and excommunicated by the repre- 
sentatives of the Roman Catholic Church. In Mex- 
ico M. Biart states that " the priests are forcing the 
poor to live in concubinage by exacting from them 



66 Spanish Romanism and EnglisJi Protestantism. 

for the marriage ceremony a sum which the Mexican 
laborer could not earn in five years, and very recent 
authorities say that the peon who is married by a 
priest becomes practically a part of the estate for life 
of the landlord who lends him the needed sum for 
marriage by the church. The marriage fees de- 
manded by the priests in Chili were twenty-five 
dollars until the government took a hand in it and 
reduced them to twenty-five cents (laughter), and 
now the priests refuse to marry the people unless 
at a price which they cannot afford to pay. So the 
governments marry them, and the priests curse them. 
4. Passing from this sad picture of immorality, I 
look at the poverty of the people. Recollect that 
in our survey we are sweeping a great territory and 
looking upon many nations, from the Rio Grande 
to Cape Horn, and from the Pacific to the Atlantic. 
You will observe that the people everywhere are 
lamentably poor. In Mexico, desiring to develop 
the country, the government some time ago oifered 
fifty dollars for every immigrant that would come, 
and promised, in addition, that they would support 
the immigrants until they secured work (while 
the United States is almost prepared to offer fifty 
dollars to every one that will stay away, for a while 
at least). (Applause.) I ask you why it is that 
Mexico bids in vain for immigration, while we are 
perplexed to know what we shall do with the mul- 
titudes who come here ? Why do not the European 
Romanists, if they love the pope and the control of 
the Roman Catholic hierarchy, why do not they go 
to Mexico, to Central America, to Brazil, and to all 



On the Western Continent. 67 

these countries that want them so much? Ah, in 
their hearts they do not love the Pope: in their 
hearts they love liberty, they love progress, they 
love prosperity. (Sensation.) And that is why, 
thank God, a great many of them are here this after- 
noon, because they believe in manhood and in God 
(applause) more than they believe in the priest or 
the Pope; because they want what the Bible and 
Protestantism have made here, and what Romanism 
has never afforded in any nation of the world. And 
when I see them coming to this country, I stand as 
their friend and say. Come ; but do not come to make 
us like those lands of the south, over which the 
papacy has had such complete control. 

Fifty years ago the Church of Rome in Mexico 
owned, through charitable grants, three-fifths of the 
wealth of the city. The income of the Bishop was 
greater than that of the Queen of England. One- 
tenth of the product of the country went to the 
clergy. In 1850 the value of church property was 
estimated at 1300,000,000, one-third the value of the 
nation. The annual income of the church of the 
city of Mexico was 120,000,000, while that of the 
republic was only 118,000,000. This immense 
wealth, it must be remembered, was wrung from 
the slender purses of the poor. 

Take the little state of Guanajuato in Mexico, out 
of whose mines eight hundred millions of dollars in 
silver have been taken, and the people there are 
working for forty cents a day. In Ecuador, a man 
is glad to get six cents a day working as a potter, 
twelve cents a day working as a hat-maker, and 



68 Spanish Romanism and English Protestantism 

twenty-five cents a day working as a silk manufac- 
turer. Romanism always impoverishes the laborer. 
The wages in all these countries show how hard it is 
for a man to live ; and yet a very large proportion of 
what they earn goes into the hands of the priests, 
even now, while their poverty grows upon them 
apace. 

5. Moreover, the papacy is so manifestly unfriendly 
to the prosperity of the people, that in all these South 
American states when there is a revolution, when 
they do rise in favor of free government, the people 
invariably strike first at the church, as their worst 
enemy. A priest cannot openly wear his cassock in 
Mexico. Parochial schools are forbidden in Mexico 
now, while they are fostered in the United States. 
Guatemala abolished both monasteries and convents : 
we help support them. San Salvador elects its own 
priests: popes and bishops appoint them in Massa- 
chusetts. Costa Rica and Argentina expel all 
priests that interfere in common-school education: 
we put them at the head of our tables at banquets, 
on our library committees, and often on our school- 
boards. (Sensation and applause.) Brazil, poor 
old Brazil, abolished the monasteries in 1870, and 
well she might, for it is not yet a year since I read 
in one of the daily papers of this city, a letter from 
a gentleman who had been travelling in that country, 
who said Brazil showed us in the Roman Catholic 
Church the most utterly corrupt institution on the 
face of the earth. That was current news in one of 
the papers that we read every morning. So you note, 
and cannot fail to be impressed with the fact, that 



On the Western Continent. 69 

everywhere when freemen rise they know their ty- 
rants and repudiate them ; and the tyrant which they 
first strike, from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn, is 
the Roman Catholic Church. 

6. Turn now to see what is the fruit of English 
Protestantism on this Western Continent. I do not 
ask you to be prejudiced in favor of the United 
States. Everybody I suppose loves his own country 
best, and is somewhat blind to its faults. But, 
ladies and gentlemen, no man is so blind but that 
he can see that for all the purposes of humanity and 
civilization, the United States of America to-day is 
worth all the rest of the Western Continent. (Great 
applause.) What of the stability of our government 
here, compared with the upheavals there? For a 
hundred years and more this government has stood, 
growing to-day in the affections of the people faster 
than ever before. One mighty Civil War only; and 
twenty-five years after, as the other day in a Southern 
State, when a friend of mine presented a company, 
many of whom had been Confederate soldiers, with 
the old stars and stripes, men who had but one arm, 
and lost the other fighting against the flag in '61, 
raised the remaining arm to swing their hats for a 
banner which presents to them a better nationality 
than we ever had before. (Great applause.) To- 
day, if a foreign squadron should land on our South- 
ern coast, it would not need a man from the north 
to drive it off and send it home again. The men of 
the late confederacy are the men of the nation to-day, 
and the stability of our government was never so 
sure as it is this blessed hour. (Great applause.) 



70 Spanish Romanism and English Protestantism 

What of the schools of learning among the people, 
what of the average intelligence, what of the average 
morality of the United States of North America? 
When such men as De Tocqueville and Bryce come 
here to study our institutions and our people, men 
who take the broadest possible sweep in their survey 
of the nation, they unhesitatingly pronounce the 
people of this country the happiest, the best governed, 
the most truly and intelligently religious, and the 
most moral on the face of the earth ; and in so saying, 
they have the statistics of the archives of all govern- 
ments to support them. The wealth and progress of 
the country exhilarates us at every turn. We protest, 
and well we may, against the poverty of the poor 
that is brought about in any case by the avarice of 
the rich ; but the vile " sweat-shops " of New York 
and Boston, against whose low wages we are so 
indignant, furnish about four times the wages that 
are paid to the laborer in the Spanish Romanist 
countries, south of the Rio Grande. The people 
in this country who are the worst off are better off 
than the common people of those countries. They 
have no middle class there. They have a few aristo- 
crats and a horde of peons. Here, about all in the 
country that is good for anj^thing is the middle class. 
(Applause.) A little would-be aristocracy, certainly 
not the cream of the nation, and a class from Euro- 
pean Romanist countries, whom I don't know as we 
can ever lift up ; but, God helping us, we will try, 
until the last and lowest man in America is a man. 
(Applause.) I know we have a hard task. I know 
there are people dumped in here from Europe who 



On the Western Continent. 71 

are very vile, but in the face of this Christian audi- 
ence, I say, though we may be slow in doing it, we 
will try until the Pole and the Bohemian and the 
Austrian and the Hungarian and the Italian, all 
degraded by ecclesiastical tyranny are all lifted up and 
ennobled. God help us, it is worth working for ! 
(Great applause.) 

V. A few words to draw the suitable inference 
from this survey, and I have done. We have looked 
upon the policy and principles, the seed-sowing and 
the harvest of Romanism and Protestantism on this 
Western Continent. Romanism tried its experiment 
with supreme external advantages for success. The 
mightiest nations of Europe at the time behind it, the 
grandest areas in the world before it, and people to 
civilize if they would civilize them ; to Christianize 
if they would Christianize them. The supreme 
experiment of Rome on the Western Continent has 
ended in supreme failure. (Applause.) Its supreme 
opportunity has terminated in supreme overthrow. 
The papacy can never point with pride to its three 
hundred years of influence on Mexico, Central Amer- 
ica and the South American states. 

Protestantism also had its opportunity. That op- 
portunity has not been fully met. Protestantism is 
not as pure as I would God it were, nor has it done 
all that we know it might have done ; but this may 
with truth be said, that the supreme opportunity of 
Protestantism on this Western Continent has issued, 
up to date, in the supremest national success that was 
ever known in the history of the world. (Great 
applause.) We might have done better: we ought 



72 Spanish Romanism and English Protestantism 

to have done better ; but when we marshal the nations 
from the Yellow Sea to the Atlantic shore, and be- 
tween the two poles ; when we order them and draw 
them up in line, the easy headship of all the nations 
is in this republic. (Applause.) 

And now what are we asked to do? We are asked 
to forget the lessons of history, to forget the experi- 
ment of Romanism on this continent, and to give her 
the command of this republic. After she has done 
what she has done in Mexico, in Central America and 
South America, we are asked to let her do it here. 
To forget history, to forget God, to forget experience, 
and to let the Pope rule in these United States. 
What is our duty when such a demand is made ? It 
is our duty to read the lesson of the past, to survey 
the face of the present, and to prophesy the future, 
and to hold fast what our fathers gave us, for God 
and for the race. If we sink in the general ruin, 
who will rise in this continent of the west to give 
hope to liberty and the world? Now is the hour, 
now is the time and the place for us to repudiate the 
claims of a system of religion that has darkened and 
blighted so large a portion of the western world. 
(Great applause.) 

This Easter Sabbath morning, at a quarter-past ten 
o'clock, I heard the fire-alarm sounding. My little 
boy came rushing up to the study, and said, " Papa, 
the fire is right here on Prescott Street." From my 
window I looked out. A great building was send- 
ing forth from its roof vast clouds of smoke and 
columns of fire. I looked upon it for an anxious 
moment, then bethought me of the brave men in this 



On the Western Continent. 73 

city who are always ready to meet emergencies like 
this. They had heard the alarm before me. And ere 
I thought of them, they were at the place of danger. 
It was but a few moments before I saw a stream flash- 
ing like silver, arching here and there through the 
smoke from the top of a neighboring building, — a 
jet of water from the steam fire-engine. Then up 
went a ladder on this side, up went one on that, and 
through the smoke, and almost into the fire, climbed 
firemen higher and higher. They were on the roof ; 
they had dragged up after them their hose, and ad- 
vanced to, apparently into, the fire. Shrouded in 
smoke, as the wind changed, they worked. I thought 
they would suffocate. A hole was cut in the roof ; 
then, so great was the outburst of the ingulfing 
smoke and fire, that I thought they must have perished, 
and that the roof had fallen in ; but as the wind 
blew the smoke aside, ten minutes after, there they 
were, pygmies in size, giants in daring, their coats 
shining wet, and the streams of water pouring at 
short range into the fiery gulf below and around 
them. As I gazed, my throat was choked, my eyes 
ran over with tears. And I thought, " Will these 
brave men dare all that to save a little property ? 
Will they do that for their credit as firemen, just to 
save that factory ? " 

And then I thought again of my country. I 
thought of the dark clouds of smoke which burst out 
here and there, revealing to us dangerous fires which 
smoulder and blaze within. I thought how here and 
there an alarm-bell rings, and a few who love their 
country hasten to the rescue. And I said to myself, 



74 Spanish Ro7nanism and English Protestantism. 

Well may men advance into the very fire of persecu- 
tion ; well may they be shrouded in the smoke of 
malicious epithet and slander ; well may they be lost 
to human praise or vision — ay, may even sink into 
the fiery gulf below, which Jesuitic hate prepares, 
rather than let this republic perish (applause) ; and 
there alone, with my eyes on heroes in action^ my 
thoughts on time and eternity, while the preachers 
were telling in their Easter sermons of the risen 
Christ, my convictions had a new birth, and I vowed 
again to God that, with truth to pour on these papal 
pretensions, I would climb to the place of peril, and 
face the fire, that I might help to save my country 
or, if needs be, perish in the struggle. (Loud and 
long-continued applause.) 



DESPOTISM IN CHURCH AND STATE 
THE PRINCIPLE OF ROMANISM. 



The words of our Lord in the Gospel according 
to St. Mark, the tenth chapter, beginning at the 
thirty-fifth verse : — 

"And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, 
come unto him, saying. Master, we would that thou 
shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall desire. 

" And he said unto them. What would ye that I 
should do for you ? 

" They said unto him. Grant unto us that we may 
sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left 
hand, in thy glory. 

" But Jesus said unto them, Ye know not what ye 
ask : can ye drink of the cup that I drink of ? and 
be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized 
with? 

"And they said unto him. We can. And Jesus 
said unto them, Ye shall indeed drink of the cup 
that I drink of; and with the baptism that I am 
baptized withal shall ye be baptized : 

" But to sit on my right hand and on my left hand 
is not mine to give ; but it shall be given to them for 
whom it is prepared. 

75 



76 Despotism in Church and State. 

"And when the ten heard it, they began to be 
much displeased with James and John. 

" But Jesus called them to him, and saith unto 
them, Ye knoAV that they which are accounted to 
rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them ; 
and their great ones exercise authority upon them. 

'' But so shall it not be among you : but whoso- 
ever will be great among you, shall be your minister : 

" And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall- 
be servant of all. For even the Son of man came 
not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to 
give his life a ransom for many." 

1. This is my text. On last Sabbath, reviewing 
a period of history measured by centuries, surveying 
the entire western hemisphere, North, Central, and 
South America, observing the nations that had been 
founded respectively by the Romanist Spaniard, and 
by the Protestant Englishman, we were forced to the 
conclusion that the work of the latter in the period 
of colonization and development had given us by 
far the better type of nationality. And when we 
farther inquired, history presented us the picture of 
a score of down-trodden and degraded nations on 
this continent, and only one single nation and part 
of Canada showing the highest characteristics of 
national life. We saw that from Mexico to Cape 
Horn, all the Romanist peoples whose governments 
the Spaniard created were characterized by lack of 
progress, by poverty, by illiteracy, by immorality, 
and by incessant change and revolution in their civil 
state. And we found that in these respects the 
United States of America, which are certainly the 



Despotism in Church and State, 77 

fruit of English, Dutch, and Swedish Protestantism, 
displayed the highest degree of literacy, morality, 
piety, wealth, progress, and stability, of any nation 
on the Western Continent, and, perhaps, of any 
nation in the world. 

2. Having taken this survey, and come to this 
conclusion, it was a gratification to me, only a day 
or two since, to find that our conclusions were 
indorsed by a famous Roman Catholic authority, — 
a writer known by the assumed name of Pomponio 
Leto, who was, if not a member of the Vatican 
Council, thoroughly informed of all its proceedings, 
and who wrote the letters which constitute the book 
which I hold in my hand, during the Vatican Council 
in 1870. In February of that year he wrote as fol- 
lows concerning the work of Romanism through the 
Spanish, in America. He is pleading for attention 
on the part of the Vatican Council to the great 
matters and concerns of national life, and he says, — 

" What part did the Catholicism of Torquemada " 
(you will remember him as the chief inquisitor of 
Spain) "and of Philip II. take in the grand dis- 
covery and colonization of those new countries which 
are the glory of the last two centuries ? Who has 
profited by the work of Christopher Columbus and 
of Amerigo Vespucci? What has Catholicism, fol- 
lowing, though more quietly, in the same track of 
discovery, effected in North America, — a country 
entirely free, in which all religions emulate one 
another? And, again, in Australia ? These two parts 
of the world came into being, as it were, in a moment, 
through the diffusion and expansion of the European, 



78 Despotism in Church and State. 

and, therefore, Christian race ; and what part in the 
miracle can be attributed to Catholicism ? Has not 
the Catholic Church, on the contrary, reason for sad 
meditation on the spectacle presented by Mexico, and 
the other unhappy republics of the South, which are 
entirely under her sway ? Here one would think are 
plenty of subjects well-deserving the whole attention 
of the Catholic hierarchy assembled in Rome ; for 
such facts may be more or less appreciated, may be 
understood in one sense or another, and attributed to 
this or that cause ; but their existence cannot be 
denied, and, therefore, they ought to be considered." 

He makes further statements, still stronger, of the 
same import, and closes his letter with these words : 
" It is a true picture of the state of things prevail- 
ing at the present day in all communities governed 
by the Ultra-Catholic rSgime<, though, of course, 
varying in different countries according to their re- 
spective conditions. We find in them many churches, 
but few schools ; more devotion than virtue ; more 
passion than judgment ; general intolerance, and 
scanty prosperity, with fluctuations of submission 
and rebellion. They are characterized everywhere 
by a craving for authority, — whether in a convent 
or a sect, — but without any appreciation of the real 
nature of authority, which is 'alternately adored with 
servility and subjected to outrage." 

In truth none can differ from these conclusions, save 
they who dispute history. But now as we turn from 
the picture of facts to the principles underlying 
those facts, there remains to us a new course of 
observation and reasoning. 



Despotism in Church and State. 79 

3. Two ideas prevail in government, the first selfish 
and despotic, the second generous and free. The first 
was illustrated in the disposition and request of 
those disciples of our Lord who aspired to prominence 
without regard to fitness, and who desired to control 
without reference to service. Our Lord says to 
them. This is the general way of the world, but this 
is not my way. No man can have place in God's 
kingdom unless he is fit for it, and his fitness for it 
lies in his power of service. Therefore, if any man 
among you will be great, let him be the servant of 
the rest ; and the man that serves most sliall be the 
prince in the kingdom of God. In other words, in 
the passage which I read in the Gospel according to 
St. Mark, Christ condemns wholly the method of des- 
potic and tyrannical government, and places over 
against it the idea which only finds its realization in 
a free republic of equal men co-operating with one 
another for tlie common good. It is these two prin- 
ciples that I desire this afternoon with you to review. 
The principle of a selfish despotism, an absolute 
monarchy, contrasted with the free constitutional 
republic, which is its contradictory ; and I trust it 
can be done in such a way that you will be inter- 
ested and profited. 

4. You know that there are countries on the face of 
the earth, and have been for many centuries, the rule 
of which is totally different from that of our own. 
These countries we call despotisms, or absolute mon- 
archies, and they present the antipodes of that kind 
of government under which we have experienced our 
advantages and found our progress. Russia and 



80 Despotism in Church and State. 

Turkey and Persia, and African tribes and nations 
to-day are the remnants of such despotisms, which 
once prevailed over most of the world; while you 
find such nations as Germany and Italy gradually 
emerging with a constitutional monarchy which is 
largely despotic ; England with an aristocracy left, 
which is a trace of that form of absolutism ; and our 
own country, with Switzerland and some other repub- 
lics of the world, endeavoring to work out in free 
mutual service that idea of government concerning 
which our Lord spoke in commendation. I wish, 
therefore, now to contrast these two general ideas of 
government, and my object in so doing will be very 
clear before I have done. 

I. What is a despotism, and what are its principles 
and effects ? For if I show you that it is the purpose 
and effort of a large body of thoroughly trained and 
disciplined men to revolutionize our form of govern- 
ment in this republic, and to give us instead a thor- 
oughly contradictory form, I really think that you 
will take a profound interest in the conclusion. 
What are the principles which underlie a govern- 
ment like Russia or Persia or Turkey ? 

1. The first of all the things assumed is that 
the ruler is chosen by Heaven, not by the people : 
God has given him a divine right to control men. 
His rights are first and regal : theirs are secondary 
and servile. The people have, under a despotic 
form of government, what the ruler grants, and 
no more. He can take all they have without 
asking the privilege from any. He commands 
them, their persons and their property. The des- 



Despotism in Church and State. 81 

potic ruler says, " Our kingdom, our people, our 
state, our rights;" as Louis XIV. said, "I am the 
state." The despot, and those creatures who are near 
him, make the laws. These laws the people must 
obey. Under a despotism the people exist for the 
ruler, not the ruler for the people. The ruler's 
money is not the people's money, but the people's 
money is the ruler's money. The ruler's person is 
not the property of the people, but the people's per- 
sons are the property of the ruler. Everything 
centres in him and around him. Life, liberty, and 
happiness are at the ruler's mercy. 

2. These are the principles. What do they show 
when they are wrought out ? What are some of the 
effects of despotic government in the history of the 
world? Mark well these effects. First of all you 
have a royal house embracing all that I have just 
described. Then you have an aristocracy very rich 
and powerful, consisting of the few only who are 
nearest the king. You have in this aristocracy 
a vast amount of immorality. No aristocracy ever 
existed on this earth under a despotism but was vile, 
because thej^ do not recognize the people below them 
as men ; and the peoples who have enslaved another, 
have violated almost all the commandments of the 
Decalogue, just because they take this view of the 
people whom they enslave, that- they are not entitled 
to human rights. The aristocrat who debauches the 
peasant and his family, or takes his property, or 
destroys his life, does not consider that he has vio- 
lated the rights of the oppressed party. So you have 
an immoral aristocracy under a despotism. People 



82 Despotism in Church and State. 

are very far separated through these castes, as I have 
already intimated. The aristocracy live on the 
people, and out of the people's work, and while they 
toil not, neither do they spin, yet they have the 
wealth, the power, and the pleasure. 

The people under a despotism may be oppressed in 
every way. In their private affairs they are sub- 
jected to constant police espionage. Every govern- 
ment that tends to a despotic form may interfere with 
the business of every man, and no man's house is his 
castle except under a constitutional government. 
The people are all heavily taxed. The little which 
they earn is divided with the government, which 
gets an undue share, and their burdens are enormous. 
They are uneducated, and always illiterate. Why ? 
Because they could not be the creatures of a tyrant 
if they were educated. Therefore, no despotism 
ever educates the common people, and never will. 
For the education of the people makes such a form 
of government impossible. The people are greatly 
restricted in their communications and movements. 
They cannot go where they will. There are thou- 
sands of Russians who would gladly have fled from 
Russia within the last five years, only that they were 
forbidden to go out of the communities in which they 
lived, and all the power of the army and the police 
of the empire prevented them from removing from 
that village or that region. Under a despotism, if 
there be a press, that press is muzzled. Only three 
or four days ago we had it stated that in Russia a 
decree had been issued to the effect that : Any person 
giving knowledge of the army, or facts concerning it, 



Despotism in Clntreh and State. 83 

to anybody outside of Russia, would be liable to 
serve seven years in solitary confinement in a fortress, 
and then be sent for the remainder of his life to the 
mines of Siberia. And George Kennan tells us in his 
valuable papers and illustrations in the Century mag- 
azine that it is a common thing for a censor of the 
press in Russia to blot out column after column, and 
page after page, from the newspapers, simply because 
the caprice of the government insists upon suppress- 
ing facts and truth. 

All tyrannies have great armies. How, do yon 
say, are those armies recruited ? From the people, 
though sometimes from a foreign people. How is it 
possible to recruit the people thus to become their 
own tyrants ? For the reason, that to be a soldier is 
not only to live easier than a peasant, but it is to 
give a chance for the exercise of the natural savagery 
of the human heart. You find, therefore, these great 
armies in all despotisms holding down the people, 
debauching their morals, and trampling on their 
rights. 

The courts are a mockery of justice, servilely 
registering the will of the ruler. The prison systems 
are all of the crudest sort. Scenic displays are used 
on a vast scale to keep the people quiet so that they 
shall not think. There is no Sabbath which is used 
as a holy day under any despotic form of government. 
Religion is made an engine of the state, and, as I 
have already intimated, in the person of the ruler is 
concentrated all the power and control over religion 
as well as politics. 

Now this is but a feeble portrayal of the actual 



84 Despotism in Church and State, 

facts under a despotic government, and yet the little 
finger of such a tyranny you and I would resent with 
our hearts' best blood. (Applause.) It is simply in- 
tolerable to men who have, as have we, a free ances- 
try and a free country. 

II. On the other hand, let me call your attention 
to the peculiarities of a free constitutional govern- 
ment as contrasted with a despotism, of which free 
constitutional government Christ announced the prin- 
ciple in the text which I have taken, and of which 
you and I, fortunately, enjoy the favor and oppor- 
tunity. What is characteristic of a free constitutional 
government, a republic or a democracy like our own ? 

1. First, the people, by their representatives gath- 
ered together, have collected and formulated those 
maxims and first principles of government which 
make their constitution. This constitution consists 
of the broadest general laws, under which they pro- 
pose to live ; and a constitution is very slowly modi- 
fied, because, at the beginning, they have put into it 
their very best intelligence, and under it allow the 
very largest liberty. For example, in the Constitu- 
tion of the United States, aside from other general 
principles of almost equal value, we have the first 
amendment saying, " Congress shall maka no law re- 
specting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting 
the free exercise thereof," — a very broad principle, 
under which all minor legislation concerning religion 
lias to be enacted, and to which it must be conformed. 
All laws which are made in a constitutional republic 
are of necessity referred to the constitution, and if 
they are in harmony with it, they can exist ; and if 



Despotism in Church and State. 85 

they are contrary to it they cannot, for the law must 
conform to this primordial constitutional law. There- 
fore there can be no irresponsible or reckless legisla- 
tion under a free government. Moreover, all the 
laws in such a republic are made by the people or by 
the representatives of the people. They elect the 
legislators, and empower them, and say what they 
shall do, and how they shall do it. Their courts, also, 
are their own creation, and those courts are compelled 
to judge according to the constitution and the laws. 
All who rise to positions of high authority in a con- 
stitutional government rise from the people. They 
have their place by their election and will. The 
people put them up, and under the constitution 
they take them down. Now it is under God, and 
only under God, have any people this right to 
govern. All must be done in subordination to His 
law. For example, the law of God is plainly a 
law of morality. No people, therefore, have a right to 
form a constitution which defies the law of moralitj^ 
or does not demand that consideration for one's fel- 
low-citizens which the Ten Commandments embody. 
2. What are some of the effects of a constitutional 
government? What are some of the consequences 
that grow out of this system of mutual service? 
No aristocracy inherits any special privilege, and laws 
are just and equal because one man is worth as 
much as another. The common welfare, not the wel- 
fare of any class, is the purpose of the state ; and 
if ever a constitutional government forgets that all 
the people are its care, and legislates for a class 
against the common welfare, it violates its first prin- 



86 Despotism in Church and State. 

ciple. Under a free constitutional governmenl the 
people are exalted. They are educated because edu- 
cation is a necessity. If one man has a treasure of 
knowledge, he recognizes the right of another man to 
the very same treasure. Therefore, all republics, in 
order to permanence, attend at once to the education 
of the masses of the people. No army is necessary, 
except a very small one to take care, as police, of the 
worst elements of society. Religion is entirely free 
to the conscience, and must be, unless there be a reli- 
gion, or what claims to be a religion, which violates 
every principle of virtue and righteousness. Under 
a free constitution all religions have rights. The 
press is free, within very generous limitations. The 
people's movements are unrestricted. They come 
and go as they please. People wonder why it is that 
we Americans are the greatest travellers in the world. 
It is because it is nobody's business whither or when 
we go. (Applause.) We go when we please and 
where we please. 

The penalties of the law are all administered with 
reference to the amelioration of the condition of 
society, and not out of vengeance or hatred for 
those who have fallen under its ban. Everywhere 
there is diffused a growing and general prosperity. 
Prosperity, like the water, seeks a common level ; 
and the tendency in a free constitutional govern- 
ment is for the prosperity of the few to become the 
prosperity of all, so that the vast fortunes which are 
gathered up by a few in one generation, are gen- 
erally distributed in one or two more, and the general 
level of the people is raised. 



Despotism in Church and State. 87 

These are a few of the visible results which show 
the eminent superiority and the remarkable con- 
trast between despotic and free government. 

Now, my friends, I have generalized enough, and 
am ready to call your attention to a specific fact. As 
I have spoken of despotisms and the conditions of 
people under them, have you not recognized, all of 
you, precisely the conditions which we found by the 
study of their history to exist in all the Mexican, 
Central American, and South American states ? Do 
you not see by this general survey of the principles 
underlying all despotisms that a people under this 
form of tyranny must be in precisely the condition 
in which we found the Spanish American nations on 
this continent? And, moreover, in reviewing the 
characteristics and results of a free constitutional 
government, do you not see that the natural, neces- 
sary, and inevitable consequences are precisely such 
as we have in our own country ? We have here in 
our land, which is so much more prosperous than all 
the rest, as we were saying last Sabbath, the results 
of free constitutional government, as in those lands 
we have the results of despotic government. And 
do you- not remember that it became very plain to us 
last Sabbath that the cause of the different condition 
of Central and South American peoples from those of 
the United States of North America lay in Romanism? 
And now we find that the difference between these 
states and our own is the outgrowth of despotic prin- 
ciples. What is your conclusion ? That Romanism 
and despotism do the very same thing ; that Roman- 
ism is despotism, always and everywhere. (Loud 
applause.) 



8S Despotis77i in CJmrch and State, 

This is the result of our reasonings, but we do not 
rely solely on one method of proof. 

III. We propose to show further that Romanism 
as a government, in theory and in practice, is despotic ; 
and in order that you may know that I do not speak 
without careful thought, I beg to give you a valuable 
quotation to substantiate my position. To-day, turn- 
ing over tlie leaves of a book, long after my discourse 
was prepared, I found a compendium of that remark- 
able and well-known dissertation on '' Protestantism 
and Catholicism in their relation to the Liberty and 
Prosperity of Nations," written by the great Professor 
Laveleye of Lidge, himself a Roman Catholic, or rather 
a Galilean French Catholic. (I give it in condensed 
form, certifying to its absolute accuracy.) This dis- 
tinguished professor, who had studied the histor}^ of 
all nations, says, contrasting Protestantism and 
Romanism, " Christianity is favorable to liberty ; 
Catholicism is its mortal enemy. So its infallible 
head affirms, and history supports his assertion. At 
first a democratic republic, the church became aristo- 
cratical, then a constitutional monarchy. To-day 
she realizes the ideal of the most absolute despotism 
conceivable. If civil society seeks to mould herself 
on the model of religious (papal) society, she must 
be subjact to a despotic government." . . . 

'' The Reformation, on the other hand, being a re- 
turn to Christianity, tended to give birth to republi- 
can and constitutional institutions." I am glad to 
bring you this strong statement to certify to the 
broad thought of a prominent Catholic, who told the 
truth, as so many of them do not and dare not do. 



Despotism in Church and State. 89 

Now when I speak of the Papal system as despotic, 
let me still further explain that I am speaking of it 
not as a religion in the sense that you use the word 
religion, for Komanism is not a religion in the sense 
in which you use the word. Romanism is a govern- 
ment, a system of government. Every man under its 
heel knows that, as does every student of its claims. 
You and I, when we think of religion, think of it as 
being possible to be lived and taught and enjoyed 
under any form of constitutional law, but Romanism 
is a form of control, and of government, not merely 
of rehgious sentiment, feeling, or life. Therefore, 
when we speak of it as a despotism, we mean precisely 
what we mean when we talk of Russia or Persia as a 
despotism. We mean that it is a form of despotic con- 
trol, having all the marks of a despotism in the civil 
state. Now let me call your attention to some of its 
claims, as it explains itself. I often regret that I have 
not the time to fully vindicate all my propositions by 
quotations from Roman Catholic authorities, for I say 
nothing here on any occasion but what is certified to 
by the facts in Roman Catholic constitutions, and by 
Roman Catholic authorities. 1. What are the claims 
of Romanism as a system? I do not identify the 
Roman Catholic here this afternoon with the system. 
He may be a thoroughly good Christian, and is en- 
titled to the most brotherly treatment from me and 
from you, whether he is a Christian or no. But when 
I talk of the Romanist system, I talk of that despotism 
which tries to crush him, and tries to crush us all. 
(Applause.) 

What, then, are its claims? It claims absolute 



90 Despotism in Qhurch and State. 

supremacy over all nations ; over all rulers, kings, 
queens and presidents. It claims absolute authority 
over all legislators and all legislation, and all law and 
all courts of law, claiming to be the highest and final 
court. There is no legislature which has a right, ac- 
cording to Romanism, to legislate in any way con- 
trary to her will. It claims absolute authority over 
every individual, whether he be Romanist or Protes- 
tant. It asserts despotic control of all social relations, 
claiming to have the sole and only right to create the 
family or dismember it. 

It claims supreme authority over all the utterances 
of men, whether those utterances be in books or 
periodicals, or in the form of vocal speech. It denies 
absolutely every man's right to say or to print any- 
thing, excepting what it indorses and what it controls. 
It denies, further, all right of private opinion and judg- 
ment, asserting its right to control all opinion, all 
judgment, all conscience, all feeling and action, 
however private. All this may be proven from 
the highest authority, from the Encyclical and the 
Syllabus of Pope Pius IX. More than I have said, 
Rome claims. It claims to be as supreme over men 
as God is, representing Him, and, therefore, having 
absolute right of control over everything and every- 
body in this world. To give you proof that this is 
true, I have here on the table (I brought the book 
for its moral effect) a book in which the Encyclical 
and the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX., shortly before he 
was declared infallible, are given in full. I have 
looked over this Encyclical and Syllabus, and the 
numbers which I have on the paper before me are the 



Despotum in Church and State. 91 

numbers of the Propositions in the Syllabus, and 
these are the condensed statement of them. It 
will take but a few moments to read, and it is of 
importance that you should know that these are the 
claims of Romanism as stated by its infallible head 
and sole authority. 

In his Encyclical, first of all, Pope Pius IX. in- 
dorses all the popes who went before him. Never 
did a man do a more risky thing, for if ever earth 
saw hell turned inside out, it was in the case of the 
lives and conduct of many of those popes. How- 
ever, he gave them his indorsement and approval. 
(Laughter and applause.) He asserts in the Ency- 
clical his right to rule over peoples, nations, and sov- 
ereigns ; the right of the church, and the duty of the 
state, to punish all violators of Romanism; he de- 
nounces liberty of conscience : declares that civil 
government has no right to interfere with saints' 
days (though they may number one hundred and 
fifty or two hundred, as they do in Italy) ; he declares 
that the civil power is subordinate to the church ; he 
curses all secret societies. Outside of faith and morals 
as well as within that realm, he demands obedience 
to the Church of Rome : declares that happiness pro- 
ceeds always and only from the Papacy ; that sover- 
eigns should submit to the Papac}^ ; and closes his 
Encyclical with a remarkably pious appeal to Mary 
as the queen of heaven and the mediatrix between 
God and men. 

Passing to the Syllabus, these are some of its prop- 
ositions. I give the numbers so that you may look 
them up for yourselves. 



92 Despotism in Church and State. 

Proposition 15. Free profession of religion is de- 
nied, and those who affirm the right to it are cursed. 
(A curse goes with every one of these propositions. 
And a curse is sure to go also with obedience to all 
the Papal commands.) 

Proposition 17. In Rome alone is salvation. 

Proposition 18. Protestantism is not true religion. 

Proposition 19. Civil power may not limit the 
church's claims. (That is, the church can claim any- 
thing it pleases, and the state has no right to limit 
its authorit}^) 

Proposition 23. Rome has never exceeded her 
rights and powers in anything that she has done. 
(To those who know Roman Catholic history that is 
an astonishing statement.) 

Proposition 24. Rome has the right to avail herself 
of physical force (to compel obedience to her com- 
mands). 

Proposition 26. She has in herself the right to prop- 
erty, to acquire and possess it, regardless of civil 
law. 

Proposition 27. Her ministers should control tem- 
poral affairs. 

Proposition 42. Civil law should not prevail over 
ecclesiastical law. 

Proposition 47. In schools, Rome should have the 
control. 

Proposition 52. Governments have no right to de- 
termine at what age people shall become monks and 
nuns, or to control their actions as to becoming such. 
And again — 

Proposition 53. Government has no right to let 



Despotism in Church and State, 93 

those monks or nuns break their vows. (That is to 
say, the poor girls who are buried in convents, this 
government has no right to help, not if they want to 
get out ever so much. This is the Papal claim.) 

Proposition 54. Kings and queens are not superior 
to the church, or exempt from its jurisdiction. 

Proposition 55. Church and state ought to be 
united. 

Proposition 73. Civil marriage (that is, the kind 
that you and I have had, all of us that were not mar- 
ried by a Catholic priest) is not a true marriage. 

Proposition 77. Romanism, excluding all other re- 
ligions, should be the religion of the state. And 
again — 

Proposition 78. Freedom of worship is denounced. 

And the Pope says finally, in the 80th and last 
proposition, that he is not reconciled to progress and 
civilization as we have it in modern times, and never 
will be. I am inclined to think that civilization and 
progress will go on whether he is reconciled or not. 
(Applause.) 

But now, Dr. Von Dollinger says that all these 
propositions, the word of the Infallible Pontiff, every 
Roman Catholic must receive or be guilty of heresy. 
They are the infallible word of the infallible authority ; 
and when Dr. Von Dollinger himself, after teaching 
for forty-seven years in the university of Munich, the 
man most eminent for learning in the entire Roman 
Catholic Church, — when he declined to accept these 
infallible dicta, he was excommunicated, and he him- 
self says tliat his life was thus put at the mercy of 
any would-be assassin and fanatic in the Roman 



94 Despotism in Church and State. 

Catholic communion. This Avas what excommunica- 
tion meant to this eminent man. 

Now, further, they extend their commands over 
everybody and everything. Direct censures are ad- 
ministered to all men if they resist, and punishments 
are threatened if they decline to obey. Rome ad- 
mits no rival, no equal whatever, in any realm, 
whether in authority, legislation, courts of law, con- 
science, opinions, property; she tolerates no rival, 
she admits no counter-claim. 

2. All this follows naturally from her assumptions. 
She claims all her authority directly and immedi- 
ately from God, precisely as every tyrant and despot 
has been wont to do in the history of the last twenty 
centuries, and that no other power on earth has 
like authority from God, — none whatever. Rome 
has all this authority, and no one else has it. Conse- 
quently there is no other authority in the world that 
is divine as the authority of the Roman Catholic 
Church is divine. As to the amount of the authority 
of Rome, the quality and quantity, she herself alone 
can tell how much of it there is ; for nobody knows 
how much God gave her, except herself, and there- 
fore she alone can define the limits of her power. If 
she says she has authority in any case, nobody can 
contradict it, because she knows from divine inspira- 
tion. Such is her theory. All this applies to all 
men, to all governments, to all courts, to all legis- 
latures, to all peoples. The Papal government is 
wholly irresponsible to anybody : I repeat, the Pope 
of Rome is wholly irresponsible to anybody. The 
people cannot correct the church if they think it 



Despotism in Church and State, 95 

goes wrong, because, first, it never can go wrong, 
and second, if it does, it is none of the people's 
business. 

3. The method of Romanism agrees with its theory, 
for it proceeds to carry out the same effectually in 
action. The Pope is the centre of all, an absolute 
ruler. Dr. Dollinger says in his Declarations and 
Letters which I have here in hand, from which 
I would be very glad to read freely, that the 
Pope has absolute authority over all governments, 
a dominion which extends over them in secular 
and political matters. He says on page 35 of his 
Letters, that the Pope's testimony concerning him- 
self is final. That is, whatever he says about himself 
you have to believe under pain of heresy. Hither- 
to the Catholic has said, " I believe this or that doc- 
trine on the testimony of the whole church of all 
times, because she has the promise that she shall 
exist forever, and always remain in possession of the 
truth." But henceforth the Catholic will have to 
say, " I believe because the Pope, who has been 
declared infallible, commands it to be taught and 
believed." Further, he says that the reason why he 
is excommunicated and cursed himself, is because 
he "will not certify his belief in the omnipotence 
and infallibility of the Pope." And finally he de- 
clares that included in the infallibility of the Pope is 
the " whole fulness of power over the whole church, 
as well as over every individual layman, — a power 
which is at the same time to be truly episcopal, 
and again specifically Papal ; which is to include in 
itself all that affects faith, morals, duties of life, and 



96 Despotism in Clmreh and State, 

discipline, and which can, without any mediation 
whatever, seize and punish, bid and forbid every one, 
the monarch as well as the laboring man." The 
Pope is the despot of all. 

You ask how is the Pope made ? He is chosen 
by the college of cardinals, of whom there are sev- 
enty, nearly all Italians. Who makes the cardinals ? 
The Pope. Who makes the Pope ? The cardinals. 
A close corporation, as you see. (Applause.) Who 
appoints the bishops? All the bishops are made by 
the Pope, and although the priests of a diocese have 
the privilege of nominating three, it happens that 
the Pope has the right to make anybody bishop whom 
he pleases, whether nominated or not, as he did in 
Brooklyn the other day. Moreover, the bishops make 
and appoint the priests, and place them in full con- 
trol in their respective parishes. Every priest is 
completely at the mercy of the bishop, and the people 
at the mercy of the priest. For the people are 
enjoined to obey the priests as if the priests were God 
Himself, under threat of direst penalty here and 
hereafter. They are absolutely at the mercy of the 
priests. The people cannot select their priests, 
they cannot appoint their priests, they cannot send 
away their priests. It is all in the hands of the 
bishop ; and the only thing which seems left to the 
people is obedience. 

Priests and ecclesiastics are declared amenable to 
no earthly authority except the Pope. There is a 
constant protest on the part of Roman Catholic 
authorities against having priests tried by any 
except an ecclesiastical court. And this absolute 



Despotism i7i Chui'ch and State. 97 

tyranny is of divine right, whatever the character 
of any or all of the popes or priests who exercise 
it, from the earliest to the present. Resistance 
is rebellion ; and I affirm to 3^ou solemnly, here 
and now, from my long and careful researches, that 
there is no crime which Romanism regards with so 
much displeasure as disobedience to the priests, the 
bishops, and the Pope. No crime against morality 
can be compared to it in enormity, either in their 
estimation or in their displeasure and vengeance. 

But going beyond all other despotisms that ever 
existed in the historj^ of mankind, Romanism follows 
the unfortunate object of its wrath into the world to 
come, and there confines him at the pleasure of its 
priests in penal fires, or liberates him at the will of 
the priests, through gifts of money and masses, so 
holding in chains the unfortunate humanity over 
which it claims dominance, even in eternity. 

In kind its effects are identical with, and in meas- 
ure far in excess of, the Avorst tyranny that ever 
existed on the face of the earth. It is rich : the peo- 
ple are impoverished. It is debauched : the people 
are degraded morally. It favors classes, and every- 
where prostrates the masses. It exercises espionage 
in the confessional over every home and every 
family. It destroys liberty and prosperity, — let 
nations and centuries be the witnesses. It creates 
superstition and infidelity, and destroys the con- 
science over which it claims control. 

Need I say, then, as I close, that in the Papacy is 
an antagonist to free constitutional government of 
the strongest and most hostile character ? Can you 



98 Despotism in CJiurch and State. 

see how the government of these United States can 
ever agree with a system like this ? Shall we suc- 
cumb to it ? Shall we yield to its claims ? Shall we 
permit its control in all these departments where it 
makes such imperious demands ? Is there not an 
emergency upon us, every one, at this hour, when its 
chief ecclesiastics declare that they intend to make it 
dominant in America ? Is not this an hour for con- 
sideration, for stud}^, for reflection, and for nourishing 
our souls in strength to resist its impudent claims ? 

There is room in this country under our free con- 
stitution for every nationality, for every race, for 
every color of men that will keep the law. There is 
room for every form of religion in the United States 
of America which does not antagonize the govern- 
ment. But there is no room within the limits of 
our territory or under our constitution for any form 
of despotism. (Applause, renewed and prolonged.) 



ROME'S DESPOTIC INTOLERANCE OF 
FREE OPINION. 



My present discourse is a continuation of that of last 
Sabbath, and needs no other text than that in which 
Christ so plainly showed the difference between the 
absolute despotism which lords it over men to their 
hurt, and that co-operative association of men in free 
constitutional government, which is so highly benefi- 
cial and so much to their welfare. You will re- 
member that on last Sabbath, after showing what are 
the principles underlying despotic forms of govern- 
ment, we contrasted their effect upon those nations in 
which they prevailed with that of free institutions, 
and made it plain that these principles were destruc- 
tive of the common welfare. Then having found 
that those lands in which Romanism is dominant 
show all those marks of prostration which are the in- 
variable results of despotic control, we concluded that 
this church was a system of governmental despotism, 
and showed that in its methods, in its principles, and 
in its results, Rome was nothing less than a genuinely 
despotic power. 

You will remember also that in the course of this 
argument, it was made plain that the intellectual life 
of the people was especially under the iron hand of 

99 



100 Homers Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

despotism, that the education of the common people 
was never a part of the policy of a tyrannical govern- 
ment, and that in no land on the face of the earth, 
where her power has been controlling, has Rome ever 
educated the common people. On the present occa- 
sion I wish to pursue still further and more at large 
this subject of the domination and control of Romanism 
over the intellectual powers, and to show that despotic 
intolerance of free opinion, with repression of free 
expression of such opinion, is a part of her policy. 

We have recently said a good deal in regard to the 
Spanish-American countries of the western world. 
Permit me to read you a remarkable utterance con- 
cerning those countries, in support of the principles 
which I have just recited. " In New Spain " (that is 
Mexico, Central and South America) " the tribunals 
of the Inquisition, which held their sessions at Mexico, 
Lima, and Carthagena, spent most of their energies in 
examining and anathematizing books. No books, 
wherever produced or in whatever language, were 
permitted to go into circulation till they had been ex- 
amined by the commissioners of the Holy Office. 
The crime of selling a forbidden book incurred for the 
first offence prohibition to the seller to deal in books 
for two years, banishment from the place where the 
business had been carried on, and a fine of one hun- 
dred ducats. A repetition of the offence brought a 
heavier punishment. As the fines went into the cof- 
fers of the Inquisition, there was a strong temptation 
to find in the books examined heresy, immodesty, or 
disrespect of the government. No one was at liberty 
to use a catalogue of books which he received from 



Mome^s Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. lOl 

abroad till he had sent it to the Holy Office, which 
was not bound to restore it. Private individuals were 
liable to domiciliary visits from the commissioners of 
the Inquisition, in search of prohibited books, at any 
hour of the day or night. Permissions to read con- 
demned books were most generally given to priests 
and monks, but this liberty did not extend to all 
books. The Spanish Index expurgatorius might vie 
in comprehensiveness with the Roman : in 1790 it 
contained no less than five thousand four hundred 
and twenty authors. Is it any wonder that a people 
whose intellect was thus stunted and repressed has, 
even to our time, shown a deplorable incapacity for 
self-government?" (Lindsay's "Rome in Canada," 
p. 344.) This will account in large part for the abject 
condition of those states which we have described 
quite recently. 

But further than this, the doctrine of the control 
of the church over the mind is carried to such an ex- 
traordinary extent that the Jesuits have invented a 
theory that it is necessary, in order to show reverence 
for the church, to sacrifice the intellectual powers. 
I have here Dr. Bollinger's statement ("Declarations 
and Letters," p. 98) in his discussion of the council of 
1870. " When the Jesuits formed the plan of having 
the papal absolutism raised to an article of faith in 
Church and State, in doctrine and adminstration " 
(and by papal absolutism he means the doctrine of 
infallibility), " they invented, as is well known, the 
so-called saerificio delV intelletto, and assured their 
adherents and disciples, nay actually convinced many, 
and among them even bishops, that the most beautiful 



102 Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

homage due to God, and the noblest Christian heroism, 
consists in a man's renouncing his own mental judg- 
ment, his self-acquired knowledge, and self-gained 
power of discernment, and in throwing himself in 
blind faith into the arms of the infallible ' magis- 
terium ' as the only sure source of religious knowl- 
edge. In the eyes of countless numbers this Order 
has, it is true, to a great extent succeeded in raising 
mental sloth to the dignity of a religious meritorious 
sacrifice, and sometimes in moving even men, who 
by their general education would certainly have been 
well capable of instituting such an historical investi- 
gation, to a renunciation of it." In other words, it is 
almost an article of faith in the Roman Catholic 
Church that the independent use of the mind accord- 
ing to its own laws is a demerit, and that the sacrifice 
of your reasoning powers is an act of goodness and 
piety toward God. 

With such a theory before us, stated in such em- 
phatic and impressive language, let us proceed to 
consider the 

I. General principles coNCERNiNa freedom 

OP THOUGHT AND OF EXPRESSION WHICH OUGHT 
TO GOVERN OUR LIVES. 

1. It is not necessary in America and in the presence 
of an audience like this to dwell at length on the 
general doctrine of freedom of thought and freedom 
of expression. We recognize that the human mind 
was made to see and to know truth and the God 
of truth, and while the mind's activities are along 
certain lines known as the laws of thought, the whole 
universe is open to its inquiries. The knowledge of 



Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 103 

truth comes through observation, research, compari- 
son, through reason, and divine revelation, and in all 
these directions the mind must, and of right ought to 
be, entirely free to pursue its inquiries subject only to 
the truth. For gaining this truth the human mind 
may well put forth its utmost efforts, nor does it ever 
attain its highest excellence save in the ardent pur- 
suit thereof. The truth may relate to physics, as in 
the case of Galileo who discovered that the earth 
moved round the sun rather than that the sun moved 
round the earth : it may relate to government, as in 
the case of the fathers of our country whose faith 
was that a government of the people, for the people, 
and by the people, was better than the government of 
a king : it may relate to religion, as when in the time 
of our Lord the full perfection of Judaism came forth 
in the better faith of Christianity. But whatever be 
the subject of thought, the mind has a right, God- 
given, to think; and I may say where it has a right, 
it also has a profound obligation. For they have not 
understood religion at all who suppose that it is to 
suppress the activity of the human mind : it is rather 
to enlarge and direct it. 

2. In all pursuits where the mind is moving freely, 
there comes interchange with other minds. Free 
expression is just as natural as free thought. So 
conversation and all verbal utterance, printing and 
writing, and all forms of books and periodicals, liter- 
ature as well as thought, speech as well as ideas, 
ought to be absolutely free. I say that it ought to 
be free when in the pursuit of truth. There is a 
kind of literature that undoubtedly ought to be sup- 



104 Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

pressed, whicli merely panders to passion and does 
not intend to exhibit truth. There is a sort of speech 
which is contrary to good morals, and so is contrary 
to good law, but it is not the speech of men who are 
searching after truth and endeavoring to elucidate it. 
3. The result of the suppression of free speech 
and free opinion is always hypocrisy. Let a man 
feel that he dare not say what he thinks, because 
priests and ecclesiastics object, and he will be likely 
to become a hypocrite in matters of religion. When 
a man is forbidden to think and speak in matters of 
religion, he is almost sure to repudiate that religion ; 
and my sympathies are with him when he does it, 
for I believe the human mind is better free without a 
religion that represses it, than it is under that religion, 
however superstitiously devoted to it. If free it will 
surely seek religion ; if suppressed, it will repudiate 
the oppressor. But truth will always overthrow 
error. All it wants is a free field. The reason why 
prejudice controls so largely, why selfish men try to 
suppress the thought of others, is because they have 
not faith in truth. When men have faith in truth, 
they need not fear error ; for truth is like the light, 
and error is like the darkness. However deep the 
pall that is spread by error over the mind, the rising 
of the sun of truth will drive away those shadows 
and give brightness instead of blackness. It will 
broaden, therefore, our views of truth, to let error do 
its worst, only let the friends of truth have oppor- 
tunity for its defence. Let error come into the field 
if it will, and show cause why it should exist. But 
let us note that, as a matter of fact, nearly every one 



Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 105 

who goes forth in this world to tell the truth is met 
not by truth and by argument, but by repression and 
denunciation. 

4. Where is the man who has ever risen up with 
truth which was contrary to the practices of his age and 
time, who has not been met with indifference, with 
slander, with denunciation, and with persecution ? 
Do we not know that the Jewish people persecuted the 
prophets and stoned them that were sent unto them ? 
And why was this ? Because, misinterpreting their 
religion and loving iniquity, they had settled down 
into superstition and immorality. It has been so in 
every age and among every people. The prophets of 
a better day, the men who come telling the truth, 
always run the ploughshare through old wrongs and 
hoary abuses, and are met by those who are profiting 
by such wrongs, with hatred and antagonism, and 
often with death. How was it in the case of our 
Lord himself ? Was it because he spoke falsely that 
men desired to crucify him ? I read only this very 
day that Count Tolstoi, the distinguished Russian 
philanthropist and author, because he had spoken in 
favor of humanity to starving Russians, had been or- 
dered by the government to remain on his estates, not 
being permitted to go among the people or to speak the 
truth about the famine. Why ? Had he not spoken 
the truth? Ought not the famine-stricken peasan- 
try of Russia to have a voice ? Ought not some one 
to speak for them ? But the truth is this : if the world 
knows the tyranny of the Russian czar, the whole world 
will protest against it, and it does not suit the despots 
to have Tolstoi tell the truth or go off his estates 



106 Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

endeavoring to improve the condition of the dying 
people of Russia whom the Government starves. It 
is the old, old story. Everywhere, in every land, in 
every clime, at every time, despots, political and ec- 
clesiastical, rather than have free thought and free 
expression of the truth, will repress and destroy and 
murder if they can, those that see and tell the truth. 

II. Following this wicked principle, Rome has 
always undertaken to suppress those who did not 
think and speak as they were told to think and 
speak by pope and priests. Now the theory^ practice^ 
and policy of Rome is, as I have already said, to 
suppress free thought and free expression. This 
is not merely their course in the past, but it is just 
as true in the present. I hold in my hand an utter- 
ance of the Roman Catholic Review, a leading 
paper in the city of New York, very recently made. 
It says (the date is the 5th of September, 1891, and 
this is editorial and therefore official), " Members 
of the Catholic Church cannot consistently judge 
for themselves, either in faith, in morals, or in eccle- 
siastical arrangements. If a man persists in judg- 
ing for himself, and following his own inclination 
in opposition to the judgment of the Church, he is 
not a loyal Catholic." That is the doctrine of Rome 
in America in 1891 and 1892. 

1. The theory of Rome which represses free 
thought and free speech is that they have all the 
truth. If any man says, I have truth, and it is not 
something which the Roman Catholic Church has, it 
is false, and because false should be suppressed. No 
matter whether it is Galileo saying that he has found 



Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 107 

out that the earth moves, — or Father McGlynn say- 
ing that he has found out that public schools are bet- 
ter than parochial, — or Father Lambert saying that 
there are laymen who are as competent to judge of 
truth as bishops. It will interest you to know that 
Rome does not suppose you Protestants to have the 
truth at all. Is Protestantism truth ? I heard a 
man say the other day that Rome held a great many 
of the doctrines which we hold, but he forgot that 
Rome does not admit that. She insists that we have 
not the truth, that all non Romanists are infidels. 
Let me read from one who is prominent in that com- 
munion and who has a right to speak. Mgr. Gaume, 
a great authority in the church in Canada, in a 
catechism of the syllabus which has the approbation of 
the bishops and of the pope, defines modern Liberal- 
ism as a sect which pretends to conciliate the modern 
spirit with the spirit of the church. " Having asked 
what are the special points on which Liberalism asks 
this conciliation he replies : ' liberty of conscience ; 
liberty of worship ; liberty of the press ; the seculari- 
zation of politics.' To the next question comes the 
reply : the Church can never accept such concil- 
iation because 'in sanctioning liberty of conscience 
and equality of worship, the Church would lose her 
reason for existence, since it is apparent to the whole 
world that there is only one true religion.' " That 
is to say, they cannot tolerate any conscience or any 
other authority than their own. "'Heresy,' says 
Father Giovanni Perrone, Professor of Theology at 
Rome, ' being a crime against the State, ought to be 
proceeded against by the civil power and the Inquisi- 



108 Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

tion.' " That is, it has no right to exist. You and 
I ought to be suppressed in all our religious life by 
the civil State. 

2. Father Braiin, a Jesuit priest in Canada, in a 
work highly approved by Canadian bishops, says, — 

" It is customary to regard Protestantism as a reli- 
gion which has rights. This is an error. Protestant- 
ism is not a religion : Protestantism has not a single 
right. It is a rebellion in triumph ; it is an error 
which flatters human nature. Error can have no 
rights : rebellion can have no rights," etc. 

The Pope is declared, by the bishops of Quebec, to 
be the supreme legislator, that is to say over all 
legislators, he determines what is right, and if they 
permit liberty of worship and he denies it, why they 
are wrong and he is right. Moreover, I find the as- 
tonishing statement made by a prominent Roman 
Catholic paper in the city of Rome, that the Pope is 
the supreme judge, the chief justice in all judicial 
affairs. Let me read precisely the statement which 
they make. The Civilta of March 18th, 1871, says, 
" The Pope is the chief justice of the Civil Law. 
In him the two powers, the spiritual and temporal, 
meet together as in their head ; for he is the vicar of 
Christ, whc is not only Eternal Priest, but also King 
of kings and Lord of lords : " and a little farther 
on : " The Pope, by virtue of his high dignity, is at 
the head of both powers." — that is, both legislative 
and judicial. He is the supreme court, and therefore 
what he says is judicially final. Now, those who do 
not submit to this ecclesiastical court are subjects of 
excommunication ; for I have here, and might read, 



Rome 8 Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 109 

the distinct statement of the bishops of Canada, that 
if a layman cites an ecclesiastic before any civil 
court that layman is subject to excommunication. 
Why? Because those ecclesiastical courts have 
supreme rights, and therefore the civil courts have no 
rights over ecclesiastics to hear or judge causes. 

When this supreme authority acts in matters of 
opinion or expression it must be obeyed. For ex- 
ample, as to the Index which proscribes books as not 
being proper to be read on account of opinions con- 
demned by the papacy : the papal claim is, that if a 
book is put on the Index, not only has no Romanist 
a right to read it, but . no Protestant has a right to 
read it. That is to say, if there are books in our 
library which are on the Index (and a great many 
of them are) you as Protestants have no right to 
read those books because you are forbidden by the 
Pope of Rome. That is the theory of the Church, 
and they cannot hold any other theory, inasmuch as 
they assume that they have all truth and we have 
none but what they indorse. 

3. When it comes to the matter of tolerance or 
intolerance, I must give you the benefit of their exact 
statements. I find that in relation to Protestantism 
statements are made like the following. The Abbe 
Paquet, who was Professor in the University of Laval 
in Canada, says, " To say that it is possible to find 
salvation in different religions, whether they be called 
Catholic, Greek schismatic, Lutheran, or Calvinistic, 
this is religious or theological toleration." In the 
mouth of an individual, this doctrine, the students are 
told, is blasphemous and absurd. Ou the lips of a. 



110 Homes Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

sovereign or the administrators of a government, it is 
an error and an impiety. Everywhere and at all 
times the principle of religious toleration is to be a 
subject of ecclesiastical censure. 

In "Plain Talk about the Protestantism of To- 
day," a Catholic book published in Boston, we find 
expressions like these : " The freedom of thinking is 
simply nonsense. . . . Freedom of thought is the 
soul of Protestantism. ... It is the same with lib- 
erty of conscience. . . . The Catholic Church alone, 
in the midst of so many different sects, avers a pos- 
session of absolute truth, out of which there cannot 
be true Christianity: she alone has a right to be, she 
alone must be, intolerant. She alone will and must 
say, as she has said through all ages in her councils, 
" If any one saith or believeth contrary to what I teach, 

which is truth, LET HIM BE ANATHEMA ! " 

I might read to you for an hour the authoritative 
statements of Rome to the effect that you have no 
right to think, and have no right to be a Protestant, 
and have no right to hold any of the forms of religion 
or truth that you hold, unless you get that right 
through the sanction of the Pope. 

III. But now comes the question as to what 
Rome would do in this country if she had the oppor- 
tunity. If we were simply discussing a Romanism 
that had ceased to exist, if we were bringing to your 
attention ideas that were old and long since outworn, 
then our time might be better employed. But if 
Romanism to-day holds precisely the position she 
has always held; if she would, provided she had 
the power in this country, do precisely as she has 



Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. Ill 

always done, and as she now claims the right to do ; 
if the United States would be Mexicanized provided 
Romanism had the power to do it ; if we should be- 
come like Spain and Central America provided Rome 
had control, — then there is certainly reason enough 
why we should consider and remonstrate. This I 
believe to be the fact ; and I bring you certain very 
recent cases to show that Roman Catholicism is in- 
tolerant to-day in these United States, both of free 
thought and free expression. 

1. The first case that I will cite is that of the 
learned Dr. Von Dollinger, of Bavaria, who died 
January 10, 1890. He was born in 1799, was or- 
dained a priest in 1822, was made a professor of 
church history and theology shortly after, and for 
the space of nearly seventy years was the leading 
light in the great university at Munich. Though a 
Catholic, in 1851 he advocated the separation of 
church and state, and in 1861 advised the Pope to 
abandon the temporal power. When the attempt 
was made to create the doctrine of papal infallibility 
in 1869, Von Dollinger remonstrated against it. The 
final result of his remonstrances was, that he was 
excommunicated, and that he died outside of the 
Roman Catholic Church, being one of the founders of 
what was called the Old Catholic Church in Ger- 
many, a return to the primitive Christianity. From 
his " Declarations and Letters " we readily gather 
the grounds of his resistance to papal Rome and the 
grounds on which he was excommunicated. 

All he claimed was the right to think, and to speak 
according to his thought of the truth. He gives the 



112 Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion, 

following reasons, among hundreds of others, why- 
papal infallibility should not be made a law and 
dogma of the Church. He says it was unknown for 
many centuries ; that Thomas Aquinas introduced it 
in the thirteenth century and supported it by forger- 
ies, — and over and over again he affirms that many 
of the doctrines of Rome rest on forged documents 
and lying testimonies, and that any fair spirit of 
historical research will find that their very founda- 
tions are thoroughly honey-combed by these false- 
hoods. He declares when Pope Agatho, 680 A.D., 
claimed infallibility by perverting Luke xxii. 32, 
there was no acceptance of it. Historically the doc- 
trine is erroneous, because some of the popes have 
been heretics, as for instance the pope Honorius, who 
was condemned for heresy. Intolerance and the 
suppression of all other faiths since the thirteenth 
century has been demanded as a duty, and he says it 
would be lifted to the rank of a dogma hereafter if 
this dogma of infallibility is affirmed. Infallibility, he 
says, demands the sanction of the Inquisition by all 
Roman Catholics. The preponderance of scholarship 
is all against papal absolutism. The Jesuits are its 
champions : these champions always rested their case 
on false testimony. It was opposed by the University 
of Paris for 400 years. He remonstrates that the 
Vatican council of 1870 Avas not free ; that the order 
of business was prepared by the Pope, and that the 
bishops had no opportunity to freely express them- 
selves ; and then he goes on to say that he will prove 
the new decrees contrary to the constitution of th« 
civil state as well as the Church. 



Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 113 

After he had spoken thus his bishop threatened 
that he jvould exercise his power against him. 
Whereupon Dollinger says, " If you intend to make 
use of your Episcopal power over me, I may still, I 
think, hope that it is the best, the noblest, the most 
beneficial attribute of that power, and the one the 
most Christlike, I mean the teaching office, that you 
will prefer to exercise upon me first. Should I be 
convinced by evidence and facts, I herewith bind 
myself to make a public recantation." But the 
power of teaching was the very last that they 
thought of exercising against him. The bishop 
threatens to employ certain severity against the 
learned and reasonable professor, to which he answers 
that he cannot be a hypocrite, that he has thoroughly 
re-examined all his positions, that he is satisfied of 
their truth, and that the falsity of the doctrine of 
infallibility is proved to a demonstration. He will 
not, as many bishops have done, perjure himself and 
give his sanction to what he knows and they know 
to be false. 

Then he challenges the bishops to come and debate 
with him on this matter; and the only conditions that 
he desires are that the words spoken may all be 
taken down, and that "a man of scientific training 
of my own choice may be present at the conference." 
The archbishop refused to have the question pre- 
sented in debate, on the ground that it would put the 
voice of history above the edict of the Church! 
That is to say, if a man prove the doctrines of Rome 
absurd from history, it would raise history above the 
Church ! How strange it seems to a lover of truth, 



114 Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion, 

to have such an objection as this presented to fi-ee 
debate. The archbishop declares that to reject in- 
fallibility is heresy, that excommunication will fol- 
low. Von Dollinger noted the threat, but stood 
firm, and then the greater excommunication was 
pronounced against him. Fourteen times they 
reported that the old hero had surrendered and had 
given up to the Pope, and fourteen times he stood 
forward and said the report was false ; that as long 
as his intellect remained clear, and as long as he 
knew truth from falsehood, he would resist the doc- 
trine of papal infallibility. The Vatican decrees lie 
had proved false to a demonstration ; and he said that 
having taught for about sixty years the truth against 
papal infallibility, he could not deny that history 
was true, on the sole authority of the Pope of Rome. 
When some suggested that he was deranged, he 
offered to prove to them whether or not he knew 
what he was about in any fair way. He refused to 
change his faith, and says that the Church regarded 
this as a greater crime than immorality. If he had 
done something outrageous in the line of morals, 
Rome would have forgiven him ; but because he 
would not change his faith, at the dictate of the 
Church, they would not tolerate this grand old man 
within its communion. He was excommunicated ; 
and he says that in that excommunication, they made 
it possible for any fanatic to kill him with the sanc- 
tion of the Church. 

This was since 1870, and in the case of one of the 
most eminent scholars in the world. Is Rome's 
method outworn? Has she ceased to persecute free 



Momes Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 115 

opinion ? Certainly not. And except the police of 
Munich had given warning and protection to tHis 
their most eminent citizen, he says he would have 
been murdered because excommunicated ; and for 
the same cause they assured him, in their infinite 
, charity, that when he died he would be condemned 
to go to h^ll forever ! 

Facts like these, occurring before our eyes, we must 
not pass over. All that this man wanted was the 
truth. And the answer was that. When the Pope 
says that a thing is true, it is true. How absurd ! 

2. But come to a case in our own country. Von 
DoUinger's offence was true thought in a matter of 
theological opinion. You all know the case of Dr. 
McGlynn. Dr. McGlynn is now in middle life. 
Born of Irish parents, educated in the common 
schools, he studied nine years in Rome, came back to 
the city of New York and became a priest. From 
the first, he was distinguished by his urbanity, his 
eloquence, and his love of the people. A few years 
ago, when the effort was made to build parochial 
schools all over this country, Father McGlynn, at 
that time pastor of St. Stephen's Church, in New 
York, said that in his opinion the public schools were 
better for the children, and he declined to give his 
influence and his efforts to the erection of parochial 
schools. This was his first offence. His next offence 
was, as a champion of temperance, to go on the plat- 
form with Protestant ministers, as with Mr. Beecher 
and Dr. Crosby, and plead for temperance. This was 
an offence against Tammany Hall and Rum rule in 
New York, and was afterwards urged against him by 



116 Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

Archbishop Corrigan. But finally, in the great citv 
of" New York, observing the woes of so many thou- 
sands of people who suffer, and wondering what 
could be done to relieve them. Father McGlynn 
thought that some modification of the social and 
property system would be an advantage. He did not 
dictate. He came on to the platform and said what he 
thought in the way of persuasion. He spoke in favor 
of a certain social system which was not revolution- 
ary, simply a modification of the present order. And 
this in loyal devotion to the common welfare. All 
this was extremely hateful to the Church, and Father 
McGlynn was summoned to Rome. He knew what 
that meant. He knew that if he went to Rome he 
would be suppressed and his manhood trampled 
under foot, whether truth was on his side or not. He 
declined to go. He was excommunicated, and driven 
out of his church in New York, and almost every 
Sabbath now for some years. Father McGlynn, before 
vast audiences in New York and elsewhere, has been 
preaching the truth as he understands it. His old 
parish is divided in twain. Not very long ago the 
finances of this parish were so low that they had a 
fair in the interests of the church, and sold liquor 
freely at this fair to make money to keep up its spir- 
itual interests (laughter); but Father McGlynn does 
not believe in that sort of thing. (Applause.) He 
is to-day an outlawed priest. Why? Because he 
entertains different ideas of education and of social 
life from those which are entertained by the Pope of 
Rome. That is in America, and he an American citi- 
zen, as prominent as the most prominent priest in 



Romes Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 117 

this city ; but he is an ecclesiastical outlaw, under 
doom of perdition, because he will not think on edu- 
cational and social questions as he has been com- 
manded to think. 

3. Now let me call your attention to another case 
totally different, and yet alike in this respect, that 
Eome will not tolerate truth or manhood against her 
commands. Dr. Richard Lalor Burtsell was the inti- 
mate friend of Father Mc Glynn, a man of large 
learning, and especially distinguished for his knowl- 
edge of theology and canon law. Dr. Burtsell natur- 
ally advised somewhat with Dr. McGlynn as friend 
with friend. Some four years ago, in February, 1888, 
a man named John McGuire, being present at one of 
Father McGlynn's meetings, before the meeting was 
opened, fell suddenly dead. John McGuire had 
owned a lot in Calvary Cemetery, which is under the 
care of Archbishop Corrigan, and of course at his 
death his children desired to place his body in that 
cemetery. Archbishop Corrigan of New York inter- 
fered, saying that all who were attending Dr. Mc- 
Glynn's meetings were excommunicated, and because 
they were excommunicated could not be buried in 
consecrated ground. So John McGuire's children 
brought a suit-at-law against the archbishop, to com- 
pel him to permit them to bury their dead in their 
own lot in Calvary Cemetery. Dr. Burtsell was a 
witness on that occasion, and in the course of his 
testimony he said that to deny to McGuire the right 
of sepulture in his own lot in Calvary Cemetery was 
contrary to the canon law. George Bliss, Esq., the 
counsel for Archbishop Corrigan, questioned the wit- 



118 Homes Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

ness closely, and finally called him a rebel against 
the Church. Now, when Dr. Burtsell declared, in 
accordance with his knowledge of canon law, a 
simple matter of fact, that Corrigan was wrong and 
that McGuire was right, he began to suffer persecu- 
tion, and to-day, having been removed from his beau- 
tiful church in New York, he is at Rondout, on the 
Hudson. His offence was that, as a witness in court, he 
told the truth about the canon law. He had no right 
to tell that truth, it seems, when it militates against 
the will of the Church. Is this freedom, or slavery ? 

Monsignor Preston at that same trial said that 
Roman Catholics must obey their bishops whether 
right or wrong. This excited amazement in the court^ 
and the question was repeated ; and Monsignor Pres- 
ton answered, " They must obey, right or wrong." He 
was asked whether a priest was bound to obey the 
canon law, or the orders of his superior, when the two 
conflicted ? " He should obey the orders of his 
superior," said Mr. Preston. " Whether right or 
wrong ? " asked the lawyer. " Whether right or 
wrong," was the startling answer of the Vicar Gen- 
eral of New York. 

4. The case of Father Lambert of Waterloo, New 
York, and his bishop, McQuaid, of Rochester, is 
equally in point. Father Lambert had been twenty 
years a priest in Waterloo, was a man of unusual 
scholarship and character, so that Protestants and 
Papists alike believed in him. Publishing a paper 
in Waterloo he criticised the action of a bishop in 
allowing a poor insane priest to be taken to the poor- 
bouse, fell under ecclesiastical censure, soon found 



Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 119 

himself the object of persecution, was taken away 
from his church, denied a parish, was left out in the 
cold, you might say, to starve. What was his 
offence ? He had criticised one in authority, gained 
the day with him in argument, and when both 
finally went to Rome, while it was decided that 
McQuaid must give him some sort of a church, the 
bishop was upheld. No one must criticise authority 
in the Roman Catholic Church. His subsequent 
history has been a painful one, and will no doubt con- 
tinue to be so. 

5. But is the press of this country free, so far as 
Rome can control it ? I have here a letter written 
hj Archbishop Corrigan to the editor of the Catholic 
Herald ; and that you may know precisely the atti- 
tude which the prelates and priests of Rome take 
toward the press, let me read. This is in 1887. 

452 Madison Ave., New York, 
April, 13, 1887. 

Editor and Propeietoe of Catholic Herald : 

Gentlemen, — By this note, which is entirely private, and not 
to be published, I call your attention to the fact that the Third 
Plenary Council of Baltimore, following the leadership of Leo 
XIIL, has pointed out the duties of the Catholic press, and 
denounced the abuses of which journals styling themselves Catho- 
lic are sometimes guilty. "That paper alone," says the Council 
(decree No. 228), " is to be regarded as Catholic that is prepared to 
submit in all things to ecclesiastical authority." 

Later on it warns all Catholic writers against presuming to 
attack publicly the manner in which a bishop rules his diocese. 
For some time past the utterances of the Catholic World have 
been shockingly scandalous. As this newspaper is published in this 
diocese, I hereby warn you that if you continue in this course of 
conduct, it will be at your peril. 

I am, gentlemen, yours most truly, 

M. A. CoEEiGAN, Archbishop of New York. 



120 Homers Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

That is to say, if the editor offends the archbishop, 
it is at his peril. What will Corrigan do ? What is 
the peril ? Why, he will simply outlaw and boycott 
the paper and ruin the publisher. That is the way 
it is done. 

But here is another case, that of Owen Smith and 
Archbishop Elder, of Cincinnati, which illustrates the 
attitude of this church to a free press. Our extracts 
are from the New York Mail and Express^ and we 
give the correspondence quite fully that there may 
be no mistaking the attitude of Roman Catholicism 
to an untrammelled press. 

Cincinnati, O., July 27, 1889. 
Owen Smith, Esq., Publisher of the Catholic Telegraph: 

Bear Sir, — In the Catholic Telegraph of July 18 appeared an 
article, copied from another paper, criticising a supposed action of 
the bishops in the last Provincial Council of Cincinnati. It was 
on the editorial page and in editorial type, in the first column. 

In the issue of July 25 appeared two original articles, likewise 
among the editorial matter, of which the first was calculated to 
bring odium both on the administration of the diocese and on a 
number of the clergy ; referring individually to one of the most 
meritorious and most venerable priests among us. The second ar- 
ticle contained some sentences injurious to the clergy of the dio- 
cese, and even unfavorable to the memory of the dead whom it was 
intended to eulogize. 

On a previous occasion I drew your attention to the admonitions 
addressed by the Sovereign Pontiff to Catholic journalists about the 
spirit that must guide them and the transgressions they must 
avoid. Since then the third plenary council of Baltimore has for- 
bidden, in very strong language, that either clergy or laity should 
assail any ecclesiastical persons, particularly those who are in ec- 
clesiastical dignity, by offensive words in the public papers or 
other publications. It declares that those who publish such things 
are "disturbers of the peace, enemies of ecclesiastical authority, 
and promoters of most grievous scandal." 

Now, then, in discharge of my duty as Archbishop of Cincinnati, 



Rome 8 Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 121 

I call on you to publish in the Catholic Telegraph of this coming 
week (Aug. 1), in the usual place and type of editorial matter, a 
declaration of your regret for each of the three articles mentioned 
above ; your retraction of all injurious assertions contained in 
them ; and your express promise that hereafter you will not allow 
anything to appear in the paper which may contravene either the 
admonition of the Sovereign Pontiff or the prohibition of the 
Council of Baltimore. 

It will be necessary to let me see the declaration and promise be- 
fore it is published, that I may be satisfied of its sufficiency. 

In case you should not think proper to comply with this require- 
ment, it will become my duty to take what other measures may be 
needed to abate the scandal. 

Very respectfully, your servant in Christ, 

William Henby Elder, Archbishop of Cincinnati. 



Cincinnati, O., July 29, 1888. 
Most Rev. W. H. Elder : 

Most Beverend Dear Friend, — Yours of the 27th inst. is 
received and contents noted. In reply would say that, owing to 
the nature of the articles referred to, I do not consider myself com- 
petent to speak on the subject, and for the further reason that I am 
now under the care of a physician and have been for the last three 
weeks. I will therefore say to your Grace that the columns of my 
paper are open to you to say what you please in regard to the arti- 
cles referred to over your signature. 

I would respectfully call the attention of your Grace to the fact 
that the publication of the Catholic Telegraph is the only means 
of support for myself and family. Your most obedient servant, 

Owen Smith, Per George A. Sturm. 
(Dictated by Owen Smith.) 

Cincinnati, O., July 29, 1889. 
OvTEN Smith, Publisher Catholic Telegraph : 

Dear Sir, — Your favor of this date is received. I sympathize 
sincerely with you in your sickness. But the offence given to reli- 
gion makes necessary a prompt reparation. And a bodily ailing 
need not hinder a well-disposed man from making honorable 
amends for an injury done, whether intentional or unintentional. 
Tou can spare yourself the labor of writing by simply publishing 



122 Homes Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

in full my letter of the 27th inst. in the editorial columns, and fol- 
lowing it immediately by these or equivalent words: — 

" As publisher of the Catholic Telegraph I hereby comply with 
the requirements of the above letter. I regret the appearance of 
the articles referred to. I retract (or, if you choose, ' disavow ') 
all the injurious assertions and inferences contained in them ; and 
I make the required promise, which I will keep loyally and honor- 
ably as long as I am connected with the paper." Sign your name. 

In oifering me the use of your columns, you forget our respec- 
tive positions. I am not arguing a case as litigant; I am giving 
judgment as bishop. Whether any of the things said in these arti- 
cles are true or false, the publishing of them is an act which the 
Council of Baltimore prohibits as disturbing of peace, hostile to 
ecclesiastical authority, and productive of grievous scandal. As 
bishop of the diocese, then, my duty requires me to adhere to my 
demand that a sufficient reparation — of which I am to judge — be 
made in the first issue of the paper Aug. 1. 

I would be very sorry to lessen in any degree the support of your- 
self and your family. It is for yourself to judge whether you 
choose to gain that support by conducting a Catholic paper, accord- 
ing to the rules and the spirit of the Catholic church. If you so 
conduct your paper as to disturb the head, assail authority, and 
give scandal, you surely do not expect that your family should be 
a valid plea for the bishop to give the sanction of his silence. 
Eather ought the interests of your family to plead with yourself, 
and induce you to so conduct your paper as to merit the support of 
loyal Catholics and the blessing of God. 

Very respectfully, your faithful servant in Christ, 

William Henby Elder, Archbishop of Cincinnati. 

Thereupon the poor sick editor, knowing full well 
that the threat of his high mightiness meant an entire 
boycott of his paper unless he did so, submits at the 
foot of the decree in the following language : — 

I cheerfully subscribe my name to the following disavowal so 
kindly dictated by his Grace: — 

"As publisher of the Catholic Telegraph, I hereby comply with 
the requirements of the above letter. I regret the appearance of 



Homers Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 123 

the articles referred to. I retract (or, if you choose, 'disavow') 
all the injurious assertions and inferences contained in them, and 
I make the required promise, which I will keep loyally and honor- 
ably as long as I am connected with the paper." 

Owen Smith. 

A card also appeared from Rev. D. O'Meara, who 
had edited the paper during Mr. Smith's illness, as 
follows : — 

A CAED. 

It appears that our article "In Memoriam," published in last 
week's edition of the Telegraph, has given offence to the arch- 
bishop and some of the priests of the diocese. The words com- 
plained of, as far as we can learn, are: " Almost all the priests of 
the diocese are looking for big parishes. There is no concealing 
the fact. It seems to be a perfect mania among them," etc. 

With regard to these words, or any other words in the article re- 
ferred to, supposed to give offence to anybody, we beg to retract 
and make an apology. We do so for the sake of charity and good- 
will among brethren, and to avoid scandal. The words were used 
merely as one of those little pleasantries which are sometimes un- 
avoidable in all hastily written articles. No offence was intended, 
and it is deeply to be regretted that an offence was taken. Of the 
rest we have nothing to say. 

D, O'Meara, Pastor of St. Andrew^ s. 

July 31, 1889. 

Here you perceive that freedom of the press is 
absolutely forbidden, and no sooner does a Roman 
Catholic editor print anything that the authorities of 
the Church do not approve, than he is threatened and 
compelled to retract. 

Let me give you another instance. Bishop 
Gilmour of Cleveland, now deceased, who was once 
a Presbyterian, had some difficulty in 1889 with 
certain priests in his diocese, one of whom was 
named Quigley, the "other Primeau. The Catholic 



124 Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Fi'ee Opinion. 

Knight^ a Roman Catholic paper published in Cleve- 
land, took the side of the priests. Bishop Gilmour 
was very much offended. Finally he excommunicated 
the editor of the Catholic Knight and all his readers 
and subordinates. Bishop Gilmour, for some reason 
or other not getting all that he desired in the contro- 
versy, wrote a letter to Archbishop Elder of Cincin- 
nati about the way in which Rome was treating the 
case, and protesting very earnestly against it. The 
editor of the Catholic Knight obtained the letter, got 
it into court, and finally had it printed. It was a 
letter that any man might write who was a free man 
and wanted his rights. Why did Bishop Gilmour 
tremble when the letter Avas thus made public in 
which he had found fault with Rome, retract what he 
had said in a letter which reads as follows : '' Last 
week the Catholic Knight published a copy of a 
private and confidential letter written by me to the 
Archbishop of Cincinnati, and by an oversight read 
in the Court of Common Pleas, Toledo, Ohio. The 
court stenographer, James E. Emery, pledged his 
word that no one would ever get a copy of said let- 
ter from his notes, and the court forbade its use in 
the suit before the court. To prevent as much as 
possible the evil intended by the publication of this 
letter through the malice of Joseph J. Greeves and 
his clique of clerical counsellors and backers, I hereby 
and by these presents withdraw every word in said 
letter of apparent disrespect to Rome, and every word 
that could be construed as a doubt of Rome." Signed, 
" Richard Gilmour, Bishop of Cleveland, October 16, 
1890." That is recent enough, is it not, to show us 



Rojne^s Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion, 125 

the relation in which these men, even bishops, stand 
to the papal power. They are all slaves, and they 
get their satisfaction by making slaves of those below 
them. 

But I have already detained you too long. My 
only purpose was to make it perfectly clear from 
recent history and from indubitable proofs that the 
attitude of Rome toward free thought and free speech 
is an attitude absolutely despotic and repressive. I 
have only begun on my proofs : I have at hand as 
many more, and they are equally convincing. We 
ourselves are suffering from the suppression of legiti- 
mate facts in this very city because of the dread of 
the Papal power by our newspapers and people. 

There has been founded by Roman Catholics in this 
country what is called the " Apostolate of the Press," 
an association whose business it is to get control of 
the papers of this country. They openly announce 
it. There is proof enough of their success. I glory 
in their courage. I wish Protestants had as much, — 
and if we have not the spirit to maintain our inde- 
pendence, let them trample upon us until the spirit 
of our fathers wakes in us. (Applause.) 

Why do people question as to whether one has a 
right to speak plainly and truthfully concerning this 
despotic Papal power? Why do timid Protestants 
tremble before the possible boycott of Romanism? 
Why is one's name thought to be almost synonymous 
with fanatic if he tells the historic and eternal truth 
concerning this hoary despotism ? It is because the 
heel of Rome is on us, even here in Massachusetts. 
It is because freedom of opinion and freedom of 



126 Rome's Despotic Intolerance of Free Opinion. 

speech are in peril here and to-day. It is because the 
community is careless, and Rome is gaining the 
ascendency. I say to you in the name of history 
which never falsifies, in the name of truth as clear as 
the sun in heaven, that the despotic power claimed 
by Rome is forever incompatible with free intelligence 
and with its free expression. (Applause.) 



THE INQUISITION, AN ESSENTIAL 
PART OF PAPAL DESPOTISM. 



Text: Proverbs xii. 10. '' The tender mercies of the wicked are 
cruel." 

The name of the Roman Catholic Inquisition has 
been a symbol of unspeakable cruelty for many cen- 
turies. It has always been, and must always be, a 
part of that despotic system which assumes to dictate 
to conscience, to thought, to word, and to deed. 

Cruelty is declared in our text to be the mark of 
wickedness. No cruelties in the history of the most 
savage of mankind can surpass those which Roman 
Catholic hierarchies, in the name of the gracious re- 
ligion of Christ, have perpetrated on mankind. Not 
the fierce savagery of the American aborigines ; nor 
the human sacrifices of the Mexican Aztecs ; not the 
slaughters of Druidic priests, nor the fierceness of 
Cossacks on the steppes of Russia ; neither the bar- 
barities of ancient Scythians nor of modern Persians, 
the bloodthirstiness of the Moors, nor the reckless 
cruelty of African savages ; nor the utter disregard 
of human suffering shown by Asiatic despots — have 
equalled, in the diversity of methods employed to 
inflict human suffering, or in the numbers of those 

127 



128 The Inquisition. 

who have fallen victims to their cruelty, the recorded 
but unspeakable horrors of the Roman Catholic 
Inquisition. 

Every savage art, the utmost ingenuity of torture, 
disregard of every principle of justice in apprehend- 
ing, confining, interrogating, torturing, and killing 
its victims, have been employed, with the studied and 
pitiless improvements of centuries, and practised 
without remorse or apology, to enslave the mind, the 
conscience, and the heart of the world. 

It is not my purpose so much to review the volu- 
minous history of Romish cruelty, scattered as it is 
through ages of time and through the annals of 
many nations, as it is to show that this dread and 
horrid tribunal is inseparable from the papal govern- 
ment ; that it is, therefore, a present as well as a past 
part of the machinery of that church, and must re- 
main such in the future ; that the church in itself is 
responsible for all that the Inquisition has ever done, 
being herself its originator, procurer, and executor ; 
and also that the ascendency of Rome means the as- 
cendency of persecution in its various forms, in order 
to the establishment of its authority. Therefore such 
ascendency should be resisted by every lawful and 
proper means by any people who cherish freedom. 

Why should I tell you of a history with which the 
whole world is familiar? Why dwell on the dread 
figures which sum up the overthrow and desolation 
of nations ? I might repeat that in the first eighteen 
years of the Spanish Inquisition, under Torquemada, 
10,220 persons were burned, and 97,000 imprisoned, 
banished, and reduced to want. "In the Nether- 



The Inquisition, 129 

lands, under the Emperor Charles Y., who was not a 
bigot, and before Philip II. began harsher measures, 
the victims of the Inquisition, burned, strangled, 
buried alive, were estimated at from a minimum of 
50,000 to a maximum of over 100,000;" 100,000 
Albigenses were tortured and burned to death, — 500 
men, women, and children being buried alive on sus- 
picion of heresy at one time ; by the revocation of 
the Edict of Nantes 700,000 Christian people were 
exiled from France ; by the massacre of St. Bartholo- 
mew, 70,000 were slaughtered without mercy. The 
Inquisition in Peru tortured to death 100,000 victims. 
And these are but suggestions and instances of the 
uncounted thousands upon whom were perpetrated 
the revolting atrocities devised by the Pope and his 
prelates. 

Read in Limborch's " History of the Inquisition " 
the story of its origin seven hundred years ago, of its 
establishment and progress in France, Spain, Italy, 
Portugal, Poland, Sicily, Sardinia, Germany, Hol- 
land, and other parts of the world. It describes its 
ministers and methods, its vicars, assistants, notaries, 
judges, and other officials ; the power of the inquisi- 
tors, and their manner of proceeding. It unveils 
their dread tribunal, opens their blood-stained records, 
describes their dungeons, the secret tortures they in- 
flicted, the extreme, merciless, unmitigated tortures, 
and also the public so-called " acts of faith," or burn- 
ing of heretics. No secrets could be withheld from 
the inquisitors ; hundreds of persons were often 
apprehended in one day, and, in consequence of in- 
formation resulting from their examinations under 



130 The Inquisition. 

torture, thousands more were apprehended. Prisons, 
convents, even private houses, were crowded with 
victims ; the cells of the Inquisition were filled and 
emptied again and again ; its torture-chamber was a 
hell. The most excruciating engines were employed 
to dislocate the limbs of even tender women. Thou- 
sands were burned at the stake. The gospel was 
gagged and crushed, and Christ himself, in the per- 
sons of his members, subjected to the anguish of a 
second Golgotha. 

Of this terrific enginery of government, kept in 
operation so long as the Pope held sway over any 
territory which he could govern as he liked, I wish 
to show not the past history so much as its present 
necessity, in order to the execution of Rome's plans. 
I purpose to show exactly from their own words, 
laws, and usages, what the papal church believes, 
employs, and practises, in the way of cruelty to 
humanity, under the guise of tender mercy and con- 
cern for their souls. For, with a revolting hypocrisy, 
all that she has ever done has been done under the 
claim that she represents the merciful Christ, and is 
doing his will under his immediate orders. 

The papal principles demand the Inquisition ; the 
principle of unchangeableness ; of authority, as they 
define it ; of infallibility, which justifies all the record 
of the past as being indisputably right, and also the 
present laws of the church. To the proof of this I 
now address myself. 

I have briefly glanced at the history of the Inquisi- 
tion. I shall show most fully that it was originated, 
justified, and supported by the popes and prelates. 



The Inquisition. 131 

This being shown, you see at once that according to 
to the papal claim, that the church is always the 
same : they not only approved of all this past con- 
duct at the time, but insist on holding the same rela- 
tion to it now that they have ever done. It is the 
church that has repeatedly defined heresy and de- 
clared it to be worthy of death. It is the approved 
officers of the church who have asserted their author- 
ity to put to death all heretics. The inquisitors and 
their familiars have been officers whom the church 
has appointed, supported, blessed, and canonized. 
The buildings of the Inquisition, its dungeons, its 
instruments of torture, were and are the property of 
the church. So, then, if the church is unchangeable, 
as they everywhere assert, what they have been they 
are now ; what they have done they would do to-day ; 
justifying their past, they would make it present; 
and the only escape from this conclusion is for them 
to repudiate their dogmas, their popes, their laws, 
and their history. 

The Roman Catholic Church, asserting the prin- 
ciple of authority over all persons and in all respects, 
enforces that authority by claiming to be, and being, 
utterly intolerant of all other religions and opinions. 
" Since the thirteenth century, no principle or doc- 
trine has been enforced with greater emphasis and 
more frequently repeated by the popes in their circu- 
lar letters, bulls, and enactments, than the doctrine 
that it is a divine commandment and sacred duty 
of every monarch and every government to make 
use of the power that is given them for suppress- 
ing those who avow a different creed, and to permit 



132 The Inquisition. 

no freedom in matters of faith and divine service. 
Tlie dogma of infallibility is at the same time a dec- 
laration of the divine truth of the doctrine that 
Catholic princes and states, so far as they possess 
the necessary power, are also bound, as a matter of 
conscience, to tolerate no other but the Catholic con- 
fession, as far as possible to keep back from official 
positions those who differ from it, to undermine their 
Christian associations, and finally to extirpate them." 
" Intolerance is to be enforced Avherever there is the 
power to enforce it. A measure of toleration may 
be allowed wherever the government is not strong 
enough to withhold it." They officially declare that 
the state is not judge in matters of religion, and 
when it allows civil liberty of worship, it usurps 
a right which belongs to the spiritual power. To 
authorize the liberty of different forms of worship 
is called immoral. The archbishop of St. Louis is 
reported to have uttered these words : — 

" Heresy and unbelief are crimes, and in Christian countries, as 
in Italy and Spain, for instance, they are punished as other 
crimes." 

From a Roman Catholic paper called the Shepherd 
of the Valley^ St. Louis, is taken this sentence : — - 

" Protestantism of every kind. Catholicity inserts in her cata- 
logue of mortal sins. She endures it when and where she must; 
but she hates it, and directs all her energies to effect its 
destruction." 

The Boston Pilots under its late editor, who has 
been so unduly extolled by Protestants, made this 
announcement : — 

*' There can be no religion without the Inquisition, which is 
wisely designed for the promotion of the true faith." 



The Inquisition. 133 

Pope Pius IX. says, — 

" The absurd and erroneous doctrines, or ravings in defence of 
liberty of conscience, are a most pestilential error, a pest of all 
others most to be dreaded in a state. Cursed be those who assert 
the liberty of conscience and worship, and all such as maintain 
that the church may not employ force." 

The maintenance of the authority here claimed 
can never exist without all the cruelties of the In- 
quisition. 

Moreover, on the fundamental dogma of the infal- 
libility of the Pope is based the fullest justification of 
the Inquisition. If the present pope of Rome is in- 
fallible, its past popes have been equally so ; and their 
deeds have, therefore, the fullest sanction and justifi- 
cation. If, then, they created, maintained, and encour- 
aged the Inquisition, it is as wholly justifiable as any 
dogma of their faith. And that they did this we 
now proceed to show. 

Pope Paul IV., who was as energetic as he was 
cruel, published a brief on the 15th of February, 1558, 
charging Valdez, the Grand Inquisitor of Spain, to 
destroy " utterly all Protestants and friends of Prot- 
estantism, though they might be bishops, archbishops, 
cardinals, nuncios, or barons, counts, dukes, princes, 
kings, or kaisers." So ran the words of His Holiness. 
And Valdez carried them out but too willingly. 

Pope Clement XI. preached a general crusade in 
1702, and granted plenary absolution to all who should 
take up arms for the extermination of ^' this cursed 
and loathsome brood," the Protestants of France. Thus 
the salvation of Roman Catholic murderers was made 
to depend on their slaughter of protesting Christians 
who denied the falsities of Romanism. 



134 The Inquisition. 

Pope Eugenius IV. began his reign in 1431 by 
causing a crusade to be preached against the Bohe- 
mians thrc^ghout all Europe, so that an end, " once for 
all, might be made of the heretics." The inducements 
offered the crusaders were great. Not only were they 
authorized to rob and plunder, but even " commanded 
to do so as a pious duty." They did their horrible 
work, assured that the uprooting of heresy was a 
work agreeable to God, performing deeds so dreadful 
that the tongue refuses to describe them. 

Innocent III., greatest of the popes, unless it were 
Gregory VIL, in the first of his pontificate, despatched 
his legate, Reiner, to Spain and the southern prov- 
inces of France, charging him with an encyclical let- 
ter to all the princes, barons, bishops, etc., prescribing 
the sternest measures against the heretics. As a pre- 
liminary step, he at once commanded the arrest of 
every known heretic, and the confiscation of their pos- 
sessions. The children of a heretic were made to 
share their parents' ruin. The house in which a here- 
tic had taken refuge was, by the same decree, com- 
manded to be razed to the ground. " No one, from 
mistaken charity, shall give succor or aid to one of 
the accused, under penalty of incurring suspicion of 
sharing his sin. The nearest ties of biood or friend- 
ship shall be held no ground for excuse. An oath 
sworn to an heretic shall be null and void, for no one 
is bound to hold faith with, but rather in every way 
to deceive, mislead, and circumvent him." 

" In a long series of bulls and decrees," says Von 
Dollinger, "more than fifty popes established the insti- 
tution of the Inquisition, or the Sacred Office. They 



The Inquisition. 135 

restored it only a few yeaps ago, after it had been 
suppressed in papal states by the Interregnum, and 
but recently they have again extolled it on occasion 
of the canonization of some inquisitors. For several 
centuries they enforced the rule that whoever per- 
sisted in differing from the church doctrine in a 
single article, was to be punished by death; they 
sanctioned the principle that a relapsed heretic, that 
is, one who has been convicted of differing for the 
second time from the doctrine of the church, was to be 
executed, even if he recanted. Should the infallibility 
of popes be proclaimed"(he was writing this before 
1870), "it would self-evidently extend to the whole 
province of morals as well as to that of dogmas. 
It would be impossible to suppose that a pope had 
ever stood by a principle that was reprehensible from 
a moral point of view, that he had ever issued an 
immoral decision, or instituted a proceeding that con- 
tradicted Christian ethics. No Catholic might under 
these circumstances either dare to say or think that 
the institution of the Inquisition was an error, or that 
the laws for it given by the popes had at times been 
immoral. " Nevertheless," he adds, " a glance at 
modern literature shows that nowadays, at all events 
outside of Italy, no one dares any longer to defend 
the institution as it really was, or the laws and 
principles given and set up for it by the popes." 

From all this action of popes, we are forced to 
one of two alternatives ; either that the popes are 
not infallible, or else, being infallible, as Romanism 
declares, they prove the Inquisition to be right, justi- 
fiable, necessary, and to be perpetuated. For what 



136 The Inquisition. 

has been the order of the church is still its standing 
law. 

Ecclesiastical persecution is declared in the Roman 
Catholic law of to-day to be a duty. Every bishop 
who takes the full pontifical oath has to swear that he 
will, to the utmost of his ability, persecute and exter- 
minate every heretic. Persecution is also enjoined as 
a duty upon private persons. 

Pope Urban II., in 1088, decreed, and it is embodied 
in the canon law of Rome, as follows : — 

' ' Those are not to be accounted murderers or homicides who, 
when burning with love and zeal for their Catholic mother against 
excommunicated Protestants, shall happen to kill a few of them." 

When the canon law was revised by a commission of cardinals 
under Pope Gregory XIII., in 1580, this decree was left in, and was 
made an article of faith. It is now de fide and part of the unal- 
terable law of the church of Rome. 

Pius IV., when the government of Lucca had 
enacted a law offering a reward of three hundred 
crowns and the reversal of any sentence of outlawry, 
or the power of transferring any such pardon, to all 
persons who should succeed in murdering any of the 
Protestant refugees who had fled from that city, 
described it as a " pious and praiseworthy decree, 
piously and wisely enacted, and that nothing could 
redound more to God's honor, provided it was thor- 
oughly carried into execution." 

The penalty of death for heresy was pronounced 
by so many popes, confirmed and repeated so many 
times, and carried into execution so many more, that 
it seems almost useless to adduce further proofs of 
their responsibility ; but I must beg to quote a por- 



The Inquisition. 137 

tioii of the Bull in Coena Domini^ used in the annual 
cursing, on the anniversary of the institution of the 
Lord's Supper. Pius V. and Urban VIII. ordained 
that it should be read on each Maunday Thursday 
from every Roman Catholic pulpit in Christendom. 
On that day, all who doubted a single article of faith, 
according to the maxim of canon law, as well as all 
who refused absolute obedience to the Pope's author- 
ity, were anathematized in language part of which is 
as follows : — 

'* Cursed, banned, in the name of God, the Father, Son, and 
Holy Ghost, and in that also of the blessed St. Peter and St. Paul, 
shall be, firstly, all Hussites, Wickliffites, Lutherans, Zwiuglians, 
Calvinists, Huguenots, Anabaptists, Trinitarians, Unitarians, and 
all and every other heretic. Secondly, all those who give any suc- 
cor or aid to any heretic, comfort him, shelter him, or show him 
countenance in any way. 

" Thirdly, all who buy, read, print, or disseminate, or favor in any 
way, any religious book published without the sanction of the apos- 
tolic throne. 

" Fourthly, all universities, colleges, and cathedral chapters on 
their appealing to a Council. 

"Fifthly, all who may offer any let or hindrance to expediting of 
money and necessaries, etc., etc., to the papal court, or who seques- 
trate its revenues ; further, those also who lay taxes on the clergy, 
though they be kings or kaisers ; those who meddle in ecclesiastical 
affairs or plans under papal jurisdiction ; those who offer any resist- 
ance to the commands of the popes, his legates or nuncios. Fi- 
nally, all who obey not the representatives of St. Peter as it would 
behoove them to obey God himself." 

This notorious bull originated undoubtedly with 
the arrogant Boniface VIII. It was enlarged and 
perfected by Urban V., Julius IL, Paul III., Gregory 
XIIL, and especially by Pius V. and Urban VIII., 
and as late as 1864, in the States of the Church, and 



138 The Inquisition. 

in Rome especially, it was proclaimed on the appointed 
anniversary in every church. 

We have thus proved that the Inquisition, in all 
respects, in its worst features, is an essential part of 
the Romish Church and of papal procedure, demanded 
by its claims, its assumed authority, the infallibility 
of its popes, and its standing laws. And that this 
conclusion is absolutely true, we now propose to 
prove by showing that up to present times^ the Inqui- 
sition is a part of the machinery of the church. 

It was in full operation, so far as the Pope's author- 
ity could enforce it, up to the year 1809, when it was 
annulled by Napoleon Bonaparte, together with all 
the mediaeval machinery of the temporal power. But 
in 1814, upon the restoration of the papacy, the holy 
father at once applied himself to resuscitate the 
Inquisition. In August, 1814, a General Inquisitor 
was appointed, and the institution of the Inquisition 
constituted as the supreme judicial tribunal of the 
Holy Office. Its spies soon spread through the land, 
penetrated every family circle, and all, on the slight- 
est cause for suspicion, were at once seized and thrown 
into dungeons of the sacred tribunal. The offences 
under its cognizance were specified, as " blasphemy, 
immorality, disrespectful conduct toward the church, 
non-participation in its festivals, neglect of its fasts, 
and especially abandonment of the true faith." 

A general edict, on the 4th of May, 1829, set forth 
that all persons possessing books of an heretical char- 
acter, or by writers of known heretical tendencies, 
whether said books were kept in their own or other 
persons' domiciles, should be " dealt with as those who 



The Inquisition. 139 

had fallen from the faith." We learn by the same 
edict that any person "who should give cause of 
offence by act or word, or threaten so doing, to any 
of the familiars, witnessess, accusers, or spies of the 
Inquisition," should thereby come within its jurisdic- 
tion ; and the Pope directed positively all his police, 
gendarmes, and public employees to assist the servants 
of the Holy Office in securing such offenders. 

To fill up the measure of horrors. Pope Pius VIII. 
decreed that whosoever heard a word of blame uttered 
against the Holy Office, the Inquisition, but still more, 
whosoever witnessed an offence against its judicial 
authority without at once denouncing, that is, report- 
ing that which he had heard or seen, should thereby 
become amenable to the same penalty as though 
guilty of the original offence. These spies and agents 
of the Inquisition were exempt from the jurisdiction 
of the civil courts, so that if taken in the act of com- 
mitting the most flagrant crime, the Grand Inquisitor 
could demand the person of his agent, and, under pre- 
tence of judging the case himself, at once set him at 
liberty by a free pardon. Remember that this was 
within the present century. 

As punishments, the Inquisition employed, as we 
learn by a regulation dating May, 1856, " excommu- 
nication and confiscation, banishment, imprisonment 
for life, application of the lash, and secret execution 
in heinous cases ; " and this Inquisition flourished in 
the Pontifical States up to 1870. While the rulers of 
France, Germany, and Portugal refused the applica- 
tion of the Pope to set up the Inquisition in their do- 
minions, Ferdinand VII. of Spain obeyed the behest 



140 The Inquisition. 

of Rome, and in 1814 established the Holy Office in 
all its ancient glory. It was formally dissolved by 
Cortez in 1820 ; re-established in Spain by the reac- 
tionary party in 1826, and finally abolished in 1835. 

Gregory XVI. inaugurated it in Sardinia, Modena, 
and Tuscany, where it remained until 1859, existing 
last of all in Rome itself, from which let us hope it 
has forever departed. 

But, bear in mind that in our own time Perrone, 
Professor of theology at Rome, demands that the 
Inquisition exist to try heretics ; while an excellent 
authority informs us that in a modified form the de- 
crees of the Inquisition are in force in the Province 
of Quebec at this very hour. 

To this demonstration by immediate present his- 
tory, of the full indorsement of the Inquisition by the 
popes, must be added yet another. While these in- 
quisitors are justly held in execration by all merciful 
and right-minded people, they have been canonized 
and extolled by the popes, and that very recently. 

Von Dollinger tells us : " Only very recently, at an 
opening meeting of the Consistory, Pius IX. delivered 
a eulogy on the Inquisition, and declared it to be 
a beneficial and genuinely ecclesiastical institution. 
On the 29th of June, 1867, Pius IX. in St. Peter's 
Church, which was magnificently decorated for the 
occasion, formally canonized Pedro Arbues, one of 
the inquisitors of Spain, who for his fierce and cruel 
persecuting, in association with Torquemada, was 
stabbed at the altar by his exasperated and suffering 
victims, on the 17th of December, 1485. Pius IX. 
recommended all Spaniards to honor this man in 



The Inquisition. 141 

future as a pattern of Christian virtues, and now with 
other saints they may invoke him to pray for them." 

Commenting on this shocking event, Von Bollin- 
ger says, " If I were now to give the Pope assurance 
of my submission to the Roman see, should I not 
have to give expression also to my most submissive 
adhesion to the eulogy on the Inquisition and to the 
canonizing of Dom Pedro de Arbues?" He certainly 
would, as all Roman Catholics must. 

Could you ask any more ample proof that the In- 
quisition, the inquisitors, their cruelty, their blood- 
shed, and all their horrible deeds, are commendable 
in the minds of the highest dignitaries of the Roman 
Catholic Church ? To fix the responsibility, more 
complete proof than this is needless ; and so I pass to 
make clear an additional fact which is most important 
to our understanding of the attitude of the Romish 
Church. That fact is, that the church itself is respon- 
sible for the Inquisition and all its horrors. Some of 
its apologists have endeavored to show that not the 
church, but the secular power, was the executioner of 
heretics. This is the merest subterfuge, and is far 
more false than true. The secular power, when com- 
pletely under th6 domination of the papacy, executed 
its behests, because it dared not do otherwise ; and no 
human government has ever instituted any persecu- 
tions which can equal in bloodthirstiness those of the 
Church of Rome itself. It was the church which ori- 
ginated and sanctioned the Inquisition. The church 
acted as police and procurer of victims, and delivered 
these victims to the executioner. If not wielding 
the axe, or piling the fagots, the church compelled 



142 The Inquisition. 

others so to do, under pain of suffering in like man- 
ner. The papal church originated the Inquisition. 
It was not the outgrowth of the national character of 
the several centuries in which it mostly flourished. 
Here we have a bull of Pope Urban IV. in 1261, in 
which he emphatically warned the general of the 
Dominicans, the great persecuting order of the 
church, never to forget that the authority to perse- 
cute heresy did not necessarily reside in the order 
itself, but had been bestowed by the Pope and could, 
therefore, at any moment be withdrawn. Thus this 
infallible pope claimed to be the source of all the 
persecuting authority. 

Pope Urban VIII. persuaded King Louis XIII. 
to attempt the destruction of Protestantism, and 
wrote to the king of France expressing his hope 
that he " would utterly uproot all the remaining 
heretics in the country." Goading all monarchs by 
direst threats to the utmost cruelties against Protes- 
tants was characteristic of all the popes. They 
exulted in the bloody work of their tools and minis- 
ters. 

When the town of Beziers was taken by the papal 
troops in 1209, and one of the most revolting massa- 
cres the world ever witnessed was directed by papal 
legates, 7,000 victims were burned alive, 60,000 died 
within the city. Those who knelt to entreat mercy 
of the conquerors were ruthlessly butchered ; and 
amidst the burning of houses, the horrible violation 
of females, the wild riot and plunder, the monks who 
accompanied the army gathered in the market-place 
to sing a hymn of thanksgiving to God. While 



The Inquisition. 143 

Europe was filled with horror at this savage victory, 
Innocent III., the great pope who ordered it, and his 
devoted clergy, rejoiced over this holocaust with 
exceeding joy, declaring that " the beginning of the 
end of heresy had dawned." 

The horrible massacre of St. Bartholomew in 
France, in 1572, whose victims numbered not less 
than 70,000 persons, was an occasion for extraordi- 
nary joy on the part of Pope Gregory XIII. Im- 
mediately on receiving the news, he summoned the 
cardinals to proceed in solemn procession to St. 
Peter's to give God thanks, while the cannons of St. 
Angelo thundered and the streets of Rome were 
illumined by bonfires. A great jubilee and plenary 
indulgence was appointed by the holy father in his 
joy on receiving the head of Admiral Coligny, which 
had been preserved in spirits by order of the king, 
Charles IX., while he further rewarded his dear son 
with the title of " Most Pious." He also caused 
a medal to be struck and a painting to be executed 
in honor of the massacre, and he issued a bull to 
Charles IX., urging him " to persevere in so pious 
and wholesome a measure till his once most religious 
kingdom should be thoroughly purged of blasphe- 
mous heresies ; " subsequently, he urged the Emperor 
Maximilian to deal with his heretical subjects as the 
king of France had done. 

It was a direct papal command which set on foot 
the fearful ravages of the Roman Catholic crusaders 
in Bohemia. Moreover, that victims might be ob- 
tained to satisfy the bloodthirsty monsters of the 
Pope, Innocent VIII., in a bull, April 3, 1487, ordered 



144 The Inquisition. 

all princes and rulers to seize and deliver to the In- 
quisition of Spain all fugitives who should be desig- 
nated to them, thus extending the arms of the Holy 
OfBce throughout the whole of Christendom, and 
practically outlawing all refugees. Fortunately, the 
princes, more humane than the Pope, refused to obey 
this order. 

Can popes shift the responsibility of these dire 
massacres upon other shoulders than their own when 
they have forced secular princes to destroy heretics, 
and have ordered armies and nations " to take up 
arms against offenders," who, as Pope Innocent III. 
said of the heretics of France, were " no better than 
unbelievers of the East, and, beyond question, far 
more noxious " ? By a special bull, this pope granted 
plenary indulgence, both for the past and the future, 
to all, whether knights or peasants, who should enter 
the field against the Albigenses, enjoined these war- 
riors to sack and spoil all the towns and villages in 
the land of the unbelievers, and promised to reward 
barons and knights with its broad lands and fair 
castles. 

So the popes furnished victims as well as exe- 
cutioners. Ay, and the church became itself the 
executioner. No catalogue can be made of papal 
crimes. Even after the restoration of Pius IX. in 
1850, the horrors committed at Perugia by the papal 
mercenaries were as dreadful as any of the Middle 
Ages. No quarter was given. The mother was 
massacred with her unborn child ; and when all re- 
sistance to the Pope on the part of the insurrection 
had ceased, and those among the rebels capable of 



The Inquisition. 145 

bearing arms had left the city, the slaughter of the 
helpless multitude left behind commenced, and the 
atrocities committed exceeded the worst ever perpe- 
trated by Austrian pandours. Women and young 
girls were foully violated, and then impaled alive, or 
thrown from the house windows to be caught on 
bayonets, or they were transfixed with lances and so 
dragged through the streets. Mothers with their 
babes were thrown into oil casks, which were then 
set on fire. Yet Pope Pius IX. thought not of laying 
ban or interdict on the brutal leader of his troops, 
the Swiss Captain Smidt, but, on the contrary, ap- 
pointed him, for his heroic conduct in this affair, to 
the rank of general of brigade ! And this, remem- 
ber, was only forty years ago. 

I have not recited these details of horrible persecu- 
tion, past and present, without a motive, which may 
well stir your minds to-day. This motive is not to 
arouse your resentment against Roman Catholic peo- 
ple, for many of those who thus suffered at the hands 
of the papacy were nominal members of the Roman 
Catholic Church, and multitudes now members of 
that church would shrink with horror at being par- 
takers in the bloody deeds which have been instigated 
and carried out by their inquisitorial superiors. But 
my motive has been to make clear to you the great 
and all-important fact that Rome's despotic sway, 
which she would set up over this country, has always 
included, as a necessary part of her governmental 
machinery, the searches, spies, arrests, imprisonments, 
confiscations, tortures, burnings, of the Inquisition, 
and, worse than all these, and resulting from them, 



146 The Inquisition. 

the consequent suppression of the intellectual life 
and progress of the people. 

It is for you to determine whether an institution 
so repugnant to all justice, so destructive to all pros- 
perity, so fatal to all aspiration, so diabolical and 
contradictory to the spirit of Christ, shall have any 
place with you and your posterity. 



PERSECUTION AND PROPERTY. 



I WILL take for my text one of those remarkably 
condensed statements of universal truth of a most 
practical and comprehejisive character with which the 
Holy Scriptures abound. It is found in 1 Tim. vi. 
10 : '' The love of money is a root of all evil." 

The pictures of the Roman Catholic Inquisition 
which have been di-awn by a hundred historians re- 
veal to us one of the most terrible chapters in human 
history. No pen nor tongue can with any degree of 
adequacy portray, or even suggest, the dreadful cruel- 
ties on the one hand, and the agonizing sufferings on 
the other, of those who carried on the Inquisition 
and of those who suffered under it. 

They reduced cruelty and torture to a science, 
ordering its processes with diabolical malignity. 
Here are some extracts from the " Sacro Arsenale," 
Bologna, 1665, a handbook of the procedure of the 
Inquisition. 

" CXXVI. Torture should begin with those most 
suspected, and, if they be a man and woman, is to begin 
with the woman, as the more timid and frail ; and if 
all are males, then with the youngest and feeblest.'^'' 

"CCIV. The sons of heretics do not incur the 
penalties enacted against them, provided they judi- 

147 



148 Persecution and Property. 

ciously disclose to the Holy Tribunal the heresy of 
their parents and secure their imprisonment." 

" CCXXI. A true Catholic is bound to denounce 
heretics, even if he have promised, pledged his faith, 
and sworn to them not to disclose them ; such promise 
or oath being of no force or obligation." 

" CCLXXVI. The doctors (and with good reason) 
hold the crime of heresy to be so atrocious, that they 
account heresy incurred through ignorance as worse 
than murder committed with treachery." 

The cruelty of these and similar ordinances which 
Rome has never repudiated, and which she still avows, 
is only too obvious. 

The catechism of the Council of Trent, asserting 
the right to punish heretics, involves the third canon 
of the Fourth Council of Lateran, which canon orders 
all secular princes to extirpate every heretic in their 
states ; and in the event of failure to comply with 
this injunction, such princes are to be excommunicated, 
their subjects released from their oath of allegiance, 
and their territories to be given over to the Catholics, 
who are to destroy the heretics, and possess the coun- 
try as their reward, besides acquiring, in virtue of 
their exerminating zeal, all the indulgences granted 
to the Crusaders in Palestine. 

This is still unrepealed and unrepented; indeed, 
there is a similar clause in Paul IV.'s bull, '' Cum Ex 
Apostolatus officio," of 1559, with this further touch, 
that heretics are " to be deprived of every consolation 
of humanity," all of which is expressly part and parcel 
of the law of the papacy to this day. 

A question which has often occurred to you and to 



Persecutioji and Property. 149 

me, and which I doubt not arose in many minds on 
last Sabbath, when the Inquisition was the subject of 
our thought, is this : What motive can account for all 
this horrible cruelty ? What inspiration, from what- 
ever source, could enter into a human being which 
would transform him into so ferocious a creature that 
he would become a party to cruelties like these ? 
What motive could cause a combination of men, who 
by some means or other were the leaders and con- 
trollers of the world for a long period of time, for 
successive centuries, in the name of the gracious and 
gentle Saviour of mankind, to take delight in tortur- 
ing to death their fellow creatures ? This question 
had never been thought about by me so much as 
during the last four months. It has gained addi- 
tional interest from the fact that of course the hun- 
dreds of thousands of people who were the victims 
of the Inquisition were absolutely hostile to it, and 
did all in their power to oppose it. They tried by 
their lives and their words to resist persecution and 
to enlighten their persecutors. Moreover, there was 
always a vast company of people who sympathized with 
these persecuted ones, — their relatives, their fellow 
citizens who knew their worth, the better minded 
conservative people of the time and of the church ; 
and yet against the strongest possible opposition of 
these, who were generally a minority though not al- 
ways so, with relentless and despotic hand, the Pope 
and his agents carried forward, for the space of at least 
eight hundred years, all the diabolical and destructive 
machinery of the Inquisition. 

1. You might suppose that religious bigotry and zeal 



150 Persecution and Property. 

could account for the Inquisition, that the hatred 
which men entertain toward those of another faith was 
the cause thereof. I seriously question this. I very 
much doubt whether men become so antagonistic to 
their fellows on account of religious hatred, because 
others hold to a different religion, and I much more 
doubt whether people who hold slightly varied shades 
of Christian belief, that is to say who hold in modified 
form the same theory and doctrine, could ever by reli- 
gious bigotry become so hostile to one another as to 
perpetrate on their neighbors the worst of all tortures. 
I do not believe that religious bigotry, taking it in the 
large historical survey, can account for the Roman 
Catholic Inquisition. 

2. And certainly it was no spirit of beneficence. It 
was not because certain in the Roman Catholic church 
thought that others had varied from them slightly in 
opinion and must be brought back to entertain the 
same opinion. There was no fear on the part of those 
who persecuted lest the slightly changed opinions of 
the persons whom they persecuted should issue in the 
destruction of their faith and the ruin of their souls. 

It has been said by some who have surveyed the sur- 
face of this great problem that men were burned at 
the stake by Roman Catholic priests and inquisitors, 
in order that they might be saved from burning in 
hell, and therefore some who have a very strong an- 
tagonism to the doctrine of hell have said, " You may 
charge upon that doctrine the Inquisition, since the 
endeavor to save the souls of the people who were per- 
secuted was made by their persecutors that they might 
not be plunged into remediless hell." But I cannot 



Persecution and Property. 151 

find, as I study the history, that this is an adequate rea- 
son or cause, because very generally those who were 
persecuted, tortured, starved and burned, were told 
that they were going to hell after all that they had 
suffered, and that remediless torture awaited them in 
the future world after the church had tortured them 
in this. Persecution was not, therefore, intended to 
be a saving process. 

3. Nor can you account for the Inquisition on the 
ground of national or tribal hatreds and feuds, for 
although it was sometimes true, as when the crusaders 
of the Pope ravaged Bohemia and France, and when 
the Duke of Alva scourged Holland, that a difference 
of nationality was in part the basis of the savagery of 
the persecutors, it yet remains true that oftentimes 
the sufferers were persecuted by their own fellow 
countrymen, by their own fellow townsmen, by their 
own kindred and relatives. So when I am asked to 
concede to the national hatreds of the time the occa- 
sion for the Inquisition, I confess that I do not find it 
so, nor do I believe that they were influential to any 
other than a small degree. 

4. Were the persecutions of the Inquisition, then, the 
result of the effort of political and priestly tyrants 
to retain unbroken control over the people whom they 
ruled, whether in ecclesiastical or civil affairs ? Is it 
not true that despotic princes, whether of the church 
or the state, see with alarm the rising spirit of liberty 
and undertake, as far as in them lies, to repress it by 
the destruction of those leaders who rise up and think 
for themselves ? It is true that despots do act in this 
way at times ; but you never knew, I think, a succes- 



152 Persecution and Property. 

sion of rulers through a period of eight or ten cen- 
turies, in many lands and under many forms of 
government, to make such an attempt, or to find an 
adequate reason for the wholesale slaughter of their 
choicest subjects in the enlightenment of the minds of 
the people who were under their government. And 
if tyrants do try by severity to retain their rule, why 
is it ? what is the selfish principle at the foundation ? 
Is it that they may have a hundred or a thousand or 
ten thousand more obedient subjects ? or is there back 
of all the despot's terrific onslaught on the up-risings 
of liberty, another motive which I am about to dis- 
close, one which I cannot doubt is fundamental in 
this whole matter of the Inquisition and the religious 
persecutions of the Roman Catholic church. Often- 
times when the civil ruler hesitated to employ force 
against the people, and was willing that they should 
think and that they should worship according to the 
dictates of their consciences, the ecclesiastical despots, 
representatives of the Pope, insisted that these rulers 
should crush the rising spirit of their people under 
penalty of themselves being excommunicated, and of 
losing their wealth, their thrones, and their empires. 

5. I propose to show on this occasion what I do 
not know to have ever been extendedly shown on 
any former occasion, that the moving cause of the 
Inquisition of the Roman Catholic church was very 
largely that lust of wealth, that spirit of avarice, that 
unbridled selfishness, which undertakes, whether in 
the highway robber or in the ecclesiastical robber, to 
plunder men of their possessions in order to enrich . 
the plunderer. I believe I can show, not that the 



Persecution and Property. 153 

other motives were wholly inoperative, but that the 
fundamental motive of the Romish hierarchy for all 
these centuries has been avarice and the lust of gain. 

Now I can bring this so near to this audience that 
you can see that it is a living question of the present 
hour. What damnable spirit out of hell could entice 
in the city of New York on Sunday, May 8, 1892, five 
thousand people to pay a dollar apiece to see a bit of 
a mummified human body ofiicially declared to be 
part of the arm of " St. Ann, Mother of the Virgin 
Mary and grandmother of God," unless it was the 
very spirit which says, '^ Your money or your life," 
whether in the massacre of Beziers or St. Bartholomew, 
the Exile of the Huguenots, or from the lips of the 
highway robber on the dark road ? (Applause.) 

6. "Love of money," said the inspired man, "is a 
root of all evil." Where would the rum traffic be if 
it were not for this love of money ? We argue that 
the appetites of men are depraved, and that they will 
have liquor ; but you find the liquor maker and vender 
creating the appetite everjr^here in those who have 
it not, for love of money. Where would prostitution 
be but for the love of money and what it brings ? 

Not even the powerful natural appetites of the race 
could nourish the dark deeds of debauched humanity, 
if it were not that gold and profit are the price and 
product of this monstrous evil. And gambling, 
whether on the horse-race at our Agricultural Fair, 
or at Coney Island and Guttenburg, or where young 
men in their clubs play cards for stakes of ten or 
twenty cents, or the millionaires of New York for ten 
or twenty thousand dollars, — I say where would 



154 Persecution and Property. 

gambling be if it were not for the love of money ? 
Where would be the oppression of the poor ? Where 
would be human slavery ? Where the traffic in the 
bodies and souls of men? Where falsehood and 
lying? Where business dishonesty? Where the 
thousand ills that afflict mankind, if the love of 
money were subordinated and a more generous prin- 
ciple prevailed ? 

We saw Columbus on the West India islands en- 
slaving the people and selling them for money, com- 
pelling forced service in the mines, and decimating 
the inhabitants of those fair islands of the Caribbean 
Sea. But Columbus was doing there only what the 
church was doing at home at that very time, plunder- 
ing and abusing myriads of men for the purpose of 
acquiring their property. We saw Cortez in Mexico 
stretching the son of Montezuma on burning coals 
that he might be forced to tell where was concealed 
the treasure of the Aztecs ; but Cortez learned to do 
this from the priests of Spain, who had been doing it 
for two hundred and fifty years. 

We saw Pizarro imprisoning the Inca of Peru until 
the room in which the Ruler was shut up was filled 
with sixteen millions of treasure, then cruelly killing 
him and taking the ransom ; and while we condemn 
his cruelty, we must remember that the nation of 
which he was a representative, under the dictates of 
the only religion which he knew, was doing the same 
with Protestants and with Roman Catholics who 
erred at all from the papal creed, and had been mur- 
dering thousands for gold during centuries. 

When, therefore, I survey the horrors of Spanish 



Persecution and Property. 155 

invasion and colonization in this country, I see the 
original cause of it in the dread cruelty and universal 
plundering of the papal power, as it ruled supreme 
over Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and parts of Ger- 
many. 

I. And now to proceed to some of the proofs that 
property was a chief purpose of persecution, that it 
should be the first thing on which to lay emphasis, 
when surveying this question in the light of the many 
histories and by comparing them. In all histories of 
the Inquisition a certain word frequently recurs to 
show the policy of the papal church. Laws are adjusted 
to regulate the meaning and definition of that word, 
and it is as common as the word heresy itself. That 
word is CONFISCATION, or the taking away from its 
owners of property and putting it into the treasury 
of the church, as a portion of the penalty for heretical 
opinions. This word, I say, is very frequently re- 
peated, and wherever repeated is full of a significance 
which I did not formerly dream was in it. 

1. I find one of the ablest historians of the Inquisi- 
tion, Henry C. Lea, saying in a paragraph of great 
moderation, considering how large is his information: 
" This greed for the plunder of the wretched victims 
of persecution is peculiarly repulsive as exhibited by 
the Church, and may to some extent palliate the 
similar action by the State in countries where the 
latter was strong enough to seize and retain it. The 
threats of coercion, which at first were necessary to 
induce the temporal princes to confiscate the property 
of their heretical subjects, soon became superfluous, 
and history has few displays of man's eagerness to 



156 Persecution and Property. 

profit by his fellow's misfortunes more deplorable 
than that of the vulture which followed in the wake 
of the Inquisition to batten on the ruin which it 
wrought." 

I find him saying again : " We therefore are per- 
fectly safe in asserting that but for the gains to be 
made out of fines and confiscations its work would 
have been much less thorough, and that it would have 
sunk into comparative insignificance as soon as the 
first frantic zeal of bigotry had exhausted itself. This 
zeal might have lasted for a generation, to be followed 
by a period of comparative inaction, until a fresh 
onslaught would have been excited by the recrudes- 
cence of heresy. By confiscation the heretics were 
forced to furnish the means for their own destruc- 
tion. Avarice joined hands with fanaticism, and be- 
tween them they supplied motive power for a hundred 
years of fierce, unremitting, unrelenting persecution, 
which in the end accomplished its main purpose." 
That is in the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, which 
closed somewhere about the middle of the fourteenth 
century. 

2. The most thrifty people were generally the per- 
secuted people. This was not always so, for I do 
not pretend to give avarice as a reason which covers 
every specific case. The Waldenses were not rich, 
the Albigenses were. But in general the people who 
think for themselves have the mental force which 
makes them more industrious than others and more 
prosperous. It therefore follows that independent 
thought and true piety are generally associated with 
worldly prosperity, and when you come to examine 



Persecution and Property. 157 

the history of the persecutions of Papal Rome, 
whether personal or general, you find that it was the 
best people who were the objects of her assault. The 
Huguenots of France, about whom you have so often 
heard, are declared in the Schaff-Herzog Encyclo- 
paedia, the latest and best of its kind, to have been 
the most industrious and intelligent people in France. 
From four hundred thousand to a million French 
Huguenots, no one knows exactly their numbers, 
who were exiled from France by the revocation of 
the edict of protection known as the Edict of Nantes, 
went to all the lands of the world as most welcome 
immigrants. They were kindly and gladly received 
in Holland, Germany, and England, and promised 
that they should have from eight to twelve years' 
residence without taxation and that the burdens of 
citizenship should be laid upon them very lightly, 
on account of their superior character and capacity, 
because the Huguenot of France was the best citizen 
that France had. All the nations were glad to take 
them in, and to give them a place and a home, not 
only for humanity's sake, but for the riches which 
they brought, the intelligence which they distributed 
in society, and the service which they rendered as 
citizens. These people were only representatives of 
the myriads who were persecuted. The Jews of 
Spain, who had turned to Christianity in the four- 
teenth and fifteenth centuries, are said by the his- 
torians to have been the flower of Spain. They had 
intermarried with the nobility, they were people of 
large intelligence and extraordinary business capacity, 
the foremost people of the Peninsula. They had so 



158 Persecution and Property. 

much legal knowledge, so many of them were in high 
places, that when the Inquisition assailed them witli 
its terrors, they we-re able to make resistance in many 
ways, paying out large sums of money for legal pro- 
ceedings on the part of their famous lawyers who 
thus attempted to withstand the tide of persecution, 
but all in vain. They offered at one time to Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella, six hundred thousand crowns of 
gold if the monarchs would save them from the exile 
which one horrible edict had put upon them. So 
vast was their wealth that thej^ may be said to have 
been the treasurers of Spain. But when they offered 
this great sum of money to be relieved from persecu- 
tion, the persecutors with Torquemada at their head, 
knowing full well that they could get more by con- 
tinuing to persecute, refused it ; and the much lauded 
Ferdinand and Isabella, at the very time when Colum- 
bus discovered San Salvador, in that very year, 1492, 
were in league with the church confiscating uncounted 
millions of the property of their best subjects and 
inflicting a blow upon Spain from which she has not 
recovered to this day. 

3. I ought to pause here, perhaps, to raise the 
inquiry why it was that so many of these persons 
who were seized for heresy had no just form of trial 
whatever. I have raised that question to myself 
more than once. Why was every principle of ordi- 
nary legal procedure violated, and every principle 
of justice set at naught, in dealing with them ? If 
they were guilty, it could have been found out, if 
those who persecuted desired to find it out by honest 
methods. But you find a singular lack in all the proc- 



Persecution and Property. 169 

esses of the Inquisition of anything which savored 
of justice. Inquisitors were utterly regardless of 
justice. Why ? Because, as I have learned, they 
had resolved to plunder their victims, they cared not 
whether they were heretics or not, whether they were 
innocent or guilty, any more than the highway robber 
cares whether the victim whom he grasps, plunders, 
and murders, is good or bad, so he gets his gold. 

If these victims had been guilty of all that was 
charged against them, they would have been innocent 
of any wrong doing. If every one of all the charges 
had been true, they could have lived in this city 
among our most respected citizens. Nothing evil 
could truly be said against them. In what did the 
crime of heresy consist? What were the charges 
which were made against these members of society 
and the church that sent them to their death, and 
gave their property to the church and state ? I cannot 
detail all the charges called, in general, heresy, — but 
I have most of them here before me as they were for- 
mulated by the chief inquisitor of Spain under papal 
direction. Look, my friends, and see what the infalli- 
ble intelligence of the papal church has declared to 
be crimes worthy of the most dreadful sufferings 
which can be inflicted ! I take them from a general 
list which I hold in my hand. '' If they know or 
have heard, that any one has said, defended, or be- 
lieved that the sect of Luther or his followers is good, 
or that he has believed and approved any of its con- 
demned propositions : to wit : — 

That it is not necessary to confess sins to the priest, 
since it is sufficient to confess them before God ; 



160 Persecution and Property. 

That neither pope nor priests have power to ab- 
solve from sins ; 

That the true body of our Lord Jesus Christ is 
not in the consecrated host ; 

That we ought not to pray k) saints, nor ought 
there to be images in the churches ; 

That there is no purgatory, nor any necessity to 
pray for the deceased ; 

That any one, althougli not a priest, may hear 
another in confession, and give him the communion 
under the two kinds of bread and wine ; 

That the pope has no power to grant indulgences 
and pardons ; 

That clerks, friars, and nuns may marry ; 

That there ought not to be friars, nuns, nor monas- 
teries ; 

That God did not institute the regular religious 
orders ; 

That the state of marriage is more perfect than 
that of unmarried clerks and friars : 

That it is not a sin to eat flesh on Fridays, in Lent, 
and on other days of abstinence ; 

If they know, or have heard say^ that any one has 
held, believed, or defended various other opinions of 
Luther and his followers, or that any one has left the 
kingdom to be a Lutheran in other countries." 

Can you see any crime in these things? can you 
see damage in them? can you see danger in them? 
And yet to assent to any one of these truths involved 
the loss of all one's goods, his liberty, his life, and 
the infamy as well as the plunder of his children. 
Now can you account, in your reason, for so fearful 



Persecution and Property. 161 

consequences coming from such innocent opinions 
without believing that plunder was the purpose of 
persecution? Do you suppose that the persecutors 
thought that these men were dangerous or injurious 
to society? I do not believe that they did. Their 
minds were made up on another basis. 

4. The church profited by all these persecutions. In 
some cases the property of the heretic was divided 
into three parts : the church took one part, the inquisi- 
tors a second part, and the third part was given to 
the treasury of the country in which the heretic lived. 
In other cases it was divided into two parts, of which 
the church took one part, and the inquisitors the 
other. And in other cases it was left as a unit, and 
the church took it all. 

Besides, this is in perfect harmony with the known, 
the well-known, avarice of Rome, to which I have 
already alluded. I am going to ask and answer the 
question, at a later date, why purgatory was in- 
vented, why indulgences, why masses, why relics? 
I cannot do that to-day ; but when I say that Rome's 
confiscations were entirely in harmony with all her 
policy, I state the simple truth. (Applause.) I give 
the reason for her course and her conduct. The In- 
quisition is only a small part of the whole system by 
which a multitude of priests live by plundering their 
fellows, and live in luxury while their victims live in 
poverty. 

II. But I now enter upon the details of the method 
of the Inquisition in confiscating the property of its 
victims. There was great prominence given in the 
minds of all persecutors, to this matter of property, as 



162 Persecution and Property. 

you will see by this fact first of all, that the popes 
themselves took the initiative, and ordered the con- 
fiscation of the goods of heretics. 

1. You find that Pope Innocent III., who is in such 
honor in the Roman Catholic church as one of the 
greatest of their popes, takes the following attitude. 
He says, "In the lands subject to our temporal ju- 
risdiction we order the property of heretics to be con- 
fiscated ; in other lands we command this to be done 
by the temporal princes and powers, who, if they show 
themselves negligent therein, shall be compelled to 
do it by ecclesiastical censures. Nor shall the prop- 
erty of heretics who withdraw from heresy revert to 
them, unless some one pleases to take pity on them. 
For as, according to the legal sanctions, in addition to 
capital punishment, the property of those guilty of 
treason is confiscated, and life simply is allowed to 
their children through mercy alone, so much the more 
should those who wander from the faith and offend 
the Son of God be cut off from Christ and be de- 
spoiled of their temporal goods, since it is a far greater 
crime to assail spiritual than temporal majesty." 

You find also that in a bull of Pope Innocent IV. 
he directs the rulers of Lombardy to confiscate with- 
out fail the property of all who were excommuni- 
cated as heretics, or receivers, defenders, or assistants 
of heretics. Pius IX., in his encyclical of 1864 which 
I have read in your hearing, commends the action of 
all his predecessors, says there is no fault to find with 
it or them : therefore he too, and all those who trust 
in him, make themselves in some degree responsible 
for these same opinions. 



Persecution and Property. 163 

Sometimes the Protestants were banished from the 
lands in which they lived and those lands were given 
to Roman Catholics, as in the case of the diocese of 
Salzburg at the close of the Thirty Years' War. 
Twenty-two thousand people were forced to leave 
their homes, solely because they loved the truth and 
liberty. Their Roman Catholic neighbors were told 
not to help them by buying their lands or their 
houses, for they should have them without purchase, 
and so they did, while these poor people hastened to 
find a more merciful government; and began again, 
in utmost poverty, a new race for life, but not until 
their money and their children as their houses and 
lands had been ruthlessl}^ taken from them. In the 
case of the Jewish converts in Spain, they were 
given from March, 1492, to the last day of July, 
about four months, to forsake all they had, and who- 
ever assisted them in any way was considered equally 
guilty with them of the crime of heresy. This was 
evidently done in order that the government might 
seize upon their property and enrich itself by their 
plunder and spoliation. We have a most pathetic 
record of how these Jews pleaded for a little time that 
they might by any means turn their lands into money 
and have somewhat to live upon as they went away. 
All mercy was denied them. They hastened to the 
seaports, meeting incredible hardships. Crowded 
into vessels, without even food enough to eat, they 
launched on the Mediterranean, many of them starv- 
ing, and being thrown overboard as they voyaged, 
in the hope of finding some government which would 
show them a humanity which the papal church has 
never shown. 



164 Persecution and Property. 

2. The confiscations were sure, relentless, and avari- 
cious. A careful inventory was made of the goods of 
every man whom they arrested. Even the debts 
Avhich were owing him were taken into the account, 
and these were made also the property of the church. 
The Inquisition was the real confiscator. But to go 
still farther, and to show how bent the church was on 
robbery, observe that when suspicion fell upon a man 
and he was arrested, the Inquisitors and their officers 
did not wait for his conviction, but instantly upon 
his arrest took all his goods, everything which he 
had, and turned his family out of doors utterly de- 
spoiled. Among the horrors of the Inquisition which 
have never been dwelt upon, so terrible were its other 
deeds, is this, that just as soon as the owner, the 
father of the family and the owner of property, 
was arrested, his family had no place to lay their 
heads. Whoever took them into his house, or gave 
them food, or sheltered or clothed them, was himself 
considered an object of suspicion. His property was 
seized, his goods were forfeited. Ay, friends, if the 
husband of your daughter had been seized in the 
night, not knowing his accuser or his crime, and 
hurried off to the dungeons of the Inquisition in the 
darkness, and she at midnight had come to you be- 
cause the inquisitors had seized her house, — if she 
had come with her baby in her arms, and her little 
ones crying at her knees, and you had taken her into 
your house, and sheltered her, you would have been in 
the prisons of the Inquisition before the next night, 
and all your property, and all that of any who showed 
you mercy, would have been taken from you. Families 



Persecution and Property. 165 

of suspected heretics, to every degree of kinship, 
who even showed them sympathy or pity, were thus 
robbed of their possessions. I ask you now, not why 
the church was inhuman, but I ask you why it was 
that in every case the first thing which they did after 
seizing the person of a man was to confiscate all that 
he had. We gaze on the Vatican and its treasures of 
art to-day. For hours and days I have wandered 
through its splendid halls, or have stood under the 
dome of St. Peter's and admired its splendor; but 
these treasures of the papacy and all its magnificence 
are the treasures of robbery, taken from infancy and 
from age through centuries of oppression by the 
foulest and most monstrous system of injustice that 
this world has ever seen. (Applause.) 

3. With these gains in view the Inquisitors 
bribed people to present testimony against those 
whom they would. I was telling you not very long 
ago of Dom Pedro de Arbues who was cannonized as 
a saint by Pius IX. only a few years ago. It was 
common and current talk in Spain that this inquisi- 
tor paid liberally for testimony against heretics, and 
there is every reason to believe that this was a com- 
mon practice of Inquisitors. Suppose you find your- 
self to-day in a state of comparative prosperity, and 
there is a bribe offered to any man who will charge 
you with expressing any of these opinions condemned 
by the church. There are plenty of people who 
would accept the bribe. One goes to the inquisitor 
and says, " I have heard this man say he did not be- 
lieve that the body and blood of Christ were in the 
mass." That is enough. A reward is given to this 



166 Persecution and Property. 

person out of your substance ; the rest, including 
your life, goes to the church. And with such bribes 
the wonder is not that many were betrayed, but that 
many more were not. My friends, there is honor in 
humanity still, and under fearful temptations, men 
have proved that there was good in them. They 
have often kept the honor which priests have tried to 
destroy. The greatest debaucher of humanity that 
this world ever saw, in my opinion, is this same 
Roman Catholic hierarchy. (Applause.) 

4. Debtors were tempted to discharge their debts 
by accusing those to whom they owed money. A 
spendthrift who had taken ten or fifteen thousand 
dollars of your money and wasted it, who was 
pressed by you for payment, might denounce you to 
the Inquisition, and all that you possessed would be 
taken from you. You would never know your 
accuser. Sometimes you may have wondered why it 
was that the most sacred relations of life were not 
proof against the Inquisition, but listen to this : 
Wives were told again and again that their right of 
dowry depended on their fidelity to the church, and 
if they married a man knowing that he entertained 
any heretical opinions, or if after they found out that 
he entertained heretical opinions they lived with 
him more than forty days, — if they did not denounce 
and betray him to the Inquisitors, they lost their 
right of dowry, and so they were stripped of all their 
property too, however good Catholics they were. 
A woman who may have heard her husband say that 
he did not think it was necessary to venerate the 
relic of St. Ann, or any other miserable old bone 



Persecution and Property. 167 

declared sacred by lying priests, may have denounced 
him to the Inquisition solely that she in her fear 
might have something to live upon when he was 
gone, rather than to wait until others denounced him 
and her right of dowry and all beside went into the 
general treasury of the church. 

In many cases where commutations were offered in 
money by accused persons they were accepted, and in 
some cases a regular business sprang up of men who, 
being told that they were likely to be denounced, 
went to the inquisitors and gave a portion of their 
property to save themselves from more terrible conse- 
quences. 

5. In the case of the dead, have you not wondered 
why it was that oftentimes the priests took up the 
ashes of the dead and showed indignity to them? 
Let me tell you why it was done in many cases. If a 
man died supposed to be in communion with the 
church, and it was afterwards believed that he was a 
heretic through any slander whatever, no matter how 
long after his death, all the property of which he died 
possessed, in whose hands soever it was found, might 
be seized. You may have taken the last sacraments 
of the church, and died a good Roman Catholic so far 
as anybody knew. Forty years, fifty years, a hun- 
dred years after, it might be said that you were a her- 
etic. Then you would be tried, although a hundred 
years dead. Your property would be traced, all your 
heirs and their heirs would be found, and the last 
penny which they had would be taken by the Roman 
Catholic church. There was no limit to the years 
which might intervene between death and such 



168 Persecution and Property. 

a trial, and the result was that in numberless cases 
people who supposed themselves secure in their 
possessions were deprived of them without any pro- 
cess of law but the processes of the Inquisition, on the 
ground that such property was once a heretic's. 

Moreover, it was a principle of papal law that no 
heretic could give a legal title to anything that he 
sold. You might have bought of me twenty years 
ago a piece of property, and I might have conveyed 
it to you in due legal form. At the expiration of 
twenty years, some one might accuse me of having 
been a heretic at the time of sale. If so, I could not 
transfer you that property legally ; then it was taken 
from you and no restitution made. 

Was there ever a more devilishly ingenious system 
of robbery since the world began ? I do not believe 
that ever any Hindu potentate under Asiatic skies 
had so much satanic ingenuity in his mode of taxing 
and plundering his people as this discloses. And yet 
this is the holy Roman Catholic infallible church. 
(Applause.) And this is the master of more people 
in Worcester to-day than you and I are willing to 
admit, not only Roman Catholics but Protestants. 
(Applause.) This is the history that our timid peo- 
ple are indorsing. This is the papacy for which they 
are building parochial schools. I am not charging 
the Roman Catholic people, God knows, with this 
villany. They are the ones who have suffered, as 
well as other protesting Christians. They are the ones 
who have been plundered for over a thousand years 
and are being plundered to-day. They are the ones 
that were cheated and robbed of thousands of dollars 



Persecution and Property. 169 

in New York last Sunday for a sight of a bit of bone. 
They are the ones whose priests go up and down the 
church aisles in this city and compel them to give 
whether they want to or not. I plead for them. I 
plead for a manly Protestantism to stand up for the 
Roman Catholics who are being trampled down. 
Help them, men of sense and humanity ! (Applause.) 
IV. But I must hasten to a close. What were the 
consequences of this system of papal plunder ? Com- 
merce and industry were ruined, business of all sorts 
was prostrated. I read from one of the ablest histori- 
ans of our time, from whom I have already quoted : 
" In addition to the misery inflicted by these whole- 
sale confiscations on the thousands of innocent and 
helpless women and children thus stripped of every- 
thing, it would be almost impossible to exaggerate 
the evil which they entailed upon all classes in the 
business of daily life. All safeguards were with- 
drawn from every transaction. No creditor or pur- 
chaser could be sure of the orthodoxy of him with 
whom he was dealing; and, even more than the prin- 
ciple that ownership was forfeited as soon as heresy 
had been committed by the living, the practice of pro- 
ceeding against the memory of the dead after an in- 
terval virtually unlimited, rendered it impossible for 
any man to feel secure in the possession of property, 
whether it had descended in his family for genera- 
tions, or had been acquired within an ordinary life- 
time. Though some legists held that proceedings 
against the deceased had to be commenced within five 
years after death, others asserted that there was no 
limit, and the practice of the Inquisition shows that 



170 Persecution and Property. 

the latter opinion was followed. The prescription of 
forty years' possession by good Catholics was further 
limited by the conditions, that they must at no time 
have had a knowledge that the former owner was a 
heretic, and, moreover, he must have died with an un- 
sullied reputation for orthodox}^, — both points which 
might cast a grave doubt on titles." 

1. As I said, commerce and industry were pros- 
trated. No more perfect system could be devised for 
ruining a country than the system of the Inquisition, 
not merely for the blood it spilled, not merely for the 
dungeons it filled, not merely for the children that 
it orphaned, and the terror which depopulated prov- 
inces, but for the plunder of the possessions of the 
people which became at once the property of the 
church and of the state. 

You have sometimes raised the question why it is 
that Spain and Portugal and Italy are so prostrate, — 
the South American republics, Mexico and Central 
America, and Quebec also, — why they are so poor and 
bankrupt. Their people have natural intelligence, 
they work very hard, they appreciate life as other 
people do. By what process were they ruined? I 
am showing you how Rome ruins all prosperity : how 
she ruined it in all these lands you can see for your- 
self in the light of to-day. 

And now, within the last fifteen years, again and 
again within the last forty, we are told that the In- 
quisition would be a good thing for America. Ro- 
man Catholic publishers and authors in New England 
publish the work of LeMaistre, in which he states 
that it is a very desirable institution to plant in every 



Persecution and Property. 171 

country, and they distinctly indorse this opinion ; and 
wherever Romanism is, as I showed on last Sabbath, 
there the Inquisition is set up. 

2. I want a word with our men of property. The 
rich men who escaped from Rome's avarice in former 
times, escaped by paying very liberally into her treas- 
ury and by becoming associate persecutors of others. 
The rich men of this country are all objects of 
priestly covetousness, and the wealth of this country 
they would be glad to have as they had the wealth of 
Mexico thirty years ago, holding a full third if not 
half of all property in their own hands. Men who 
have money cannot spend their wealth better than 
by resisting the inroads of this power. If you expect 
your children to keep what you leave them, make it 
impossible for Romanism to rule this nation. 

3. A word with the prosperous citizens of the mid- 
dle class. Why is it that Rome has no middle class 
in any land where she has full sway ? Because the 
middle class are really the people who have the 
wealth of the country, they are its industrious, intel- 
ligent, prosperous workers. There is no middle class 
in Mexico nor Central America, and there are none 
in Italy. There was none in Spain, — there is none 
now. The very rich are there and the very poor. 
What is the destruction of the middle class ? 

I might answer by asking what is the source of its 
prosperity ? 

Education, intelligence, protected industry, honor, 
truth, pure religion, these are the allies of the people, 
these create the middle class. I appeal to the middle 
class of America. I ask you to notice that the Ro- 



172 Persecution and Property. 

manism which our papers said last Monday morning 
was to control half of our population in 1930, is the 
agency which blots out the middle class. There is no 
opportunity for you to go up in fortune and become 
the millionaires ; you have got to go down and be the 
slaves when Rome comes into power. Are you ready 
to do it ? Putting on her screws wherever she can, 
as in the case of the Knights of Labor some years ago, 
when they were numerous and powerful, Rome en- 
deavors to squeeze out the life-blood of a nation's 
wealth and to turn it to gold in her treasury, while 
she turns and turns again the omnipresent enginery 
which a little while ago was red hot persecution, 
and in a little while would be again, if she had her 
way unhindered. 

The boycott is a Roman Catholic institution. 
There are business men on our streets to-day who are 
afraid of it and have told me so. They hold their 
trade and their money by their silence and acquies- 
cence to Romish oppression and threats. It is only 
the shadow of the Inquisition stalking by, and threat- 
ening to seize the heretic's property if he does not 
bow submissively to the church. 

All that we have said to-day will be made much 
clearer on next Sunday, when I put over against it a 
background of still larger proof. 

Thus I have given you some of the principles which 
have forced the submission of men to the Papacy and 
have continued the existence of the Roman Catholic 
church. Some of the most evil things in this world 
have had the longest life. Slavery has endured for 
centuries because those who enslave men think that 



Persecution and Property. 173 

they make wealth by it. Other curses of our own 
and former times have seemed to almost outlast the 
race which they are ruining, although we know how 
exceedingly evil they are. Do not infer because the 
Roman Catholic church is old and still exists, that 
therefore it is good or that God favors it. The devil 
lives, and hosts of people follow him still in defiance 
of the good God. But let us believe that however 
long wrong endures, however hoary robbery grows, 
however high the treasure of plunderers is piled, how- 
ever blasphemy attempts to dethrone God, the avenger 
who sits in the Heavens enthroned will laugh at their 
presumption, for He knows that their calamity and 
overthrow draweth nigh. (Great Applause.) 



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PAPAL GREED OF WEALTH. 



I RESUi^iE the general subject where I left it on 
last Sunday, taking the same text, with an additional 
one ; viz., 1 Timothy, 6th chapter, 10th verse : " The 
love of money is a root of all evil ; " adding to it this 
from the lesson which I read in Acts, the 8th chap- 
ter, from the 18th to the 21st verses: "And when 
Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles' 
hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them 
money, saying. Give me also this power, that on 
whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy 
Ghost. But Peter said unto him. Thy money perish 
with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of 
God may be purchased with money. Thou hast 
neither part nor lot in this matter ; for thy heart is 
not right in the sight of God." 

The use of money in several ways recorded in 
Bible history is clearly subject to most severe cen- 
sure. Gehazi, the servant of Elisha, taking money 
for the service which his master had done Naaman, 
gets the gold by falsehood, and the leprosy with it as 
a mark of God's displeasure. Judas Iscariot, because 
he was a thief, sold his Lord, the incarnate righteous- 
ness, for thirty pieces of silver, and became forever 
infamous. Simon the magician, proposing to buy 

175 



176 Papal G-reed of Wealth, 

spiritual power, represents the spirit of all who deem 
that the gifts of God can be purchased with money. 
These incidents indicate, as do a thousand passages 
of Holy Writ, how utterly inconsistent it is with the 
spirit of Christ either to passionately love money, or 
to barter for it, or pretend to barter for it, spiritual 
good. If the Holy Scriptures have set their seal on 
any one thing so markedly that we cannot doubt 
their meaning, they have sealed this as a truth for- 
ever, that avarice and greed, selfishness and a grasp- 
ing spirit, are totally inconsistent with true religion. 

On the previous occasion, at such length that I 
trust the proofs were adequate, I showed to this 
audience that a moving cause of the Inquisition of 
the Roman Catholic Church has been its greed of 
gold. Those of you who heard the facts and argu- 
ments were satisfied that they revealed the true spirit 
of Romanism ; but I was the more sure that it was 
true, because, behind all then said, I had in mind a 
clear historical survey of the entire policy, spirit, 
and intent of the Roman Catholic hierarchy for the 
last thousand years, and that vision reveals this 
hierarchy as bartering for money everything of 
which they declare themselves possessed, and show- 
ing, not merely in the Inquisition, but in every day's 
work, in every year's life, and in every century's 
career, that greed of money is a paramount considera- 
tion with its leading spirits and directors. This let 
me prove to you on the present occasion. 

You will not suppose that I deny that a great many 
of the priests of the Roman Catholic Church are men 
of noble generosity, — but they do not control that 



Papal G-reed of Wealth. 177 

church. I am talkmg not about individual Roman 
Catholics, but about the entire policy of the church, 
when I cite it before the bar of Christianity as 
branded with a covetousness and lust of gold which 
is wholly inconsistent with the Christian spirit. In 
order to demonstrate this, I propose to name to you a 
few of the articles which Rome offers for money. On 
so sordid a theme I cannot suppose that I shall be able 
to speak with any very great eloquence. If I should 
recite to you in detail the articles which are for sale 
in a retail store, you, as merchants, might be commer- 
cially interested, but in general you would hardly ex- 
pect to find the recital of such a catalogue thrillingly 
interesting. However, I think I can interest you, 
even in the details of the Romish shop ; for the 
Italians call the Roman Catholic Church a shop, 
because they have so much on sale, and the French 
have a proverb that Romanism is the "religion of 
money." 

I. I propose first to speak very briefly, reserving 
more for a later time, of the obvious wealth of the 
churchy naming a few out of the multitude of facts. 

1. Dr. Edward McGlynn says that the present 
Pope is worth a hundred million dollars. Dr. 
McGlynn lived nine years in Rome, and is a very 
intelligent man. I am not inquiring where the Pope 
obtained this wealth. I shall inquire later. Is not 
this a pretty good sum for the so-called vicar of 
Christ, the representative of Peter the fisherman, to 
have by him ? Pope John XXII. was the son of a 
cobbler. He was not in office for a long period, and 
his pontificate was during the great schism, when the 



178 Papal Cf-reed of Wealth. 

revenues of the church were jnuch smaller than 
usual ; but he managed, in the period of his official 
life, to get so much, that at his death he left eighteen 
millions of ducats, and valuables to the amount of 
seventeen millions more. He had no ancestral 
wealth. 

2. The Jesuits, the dominant society in the Roman 
Catholic Church, are bound by a vow of poverty ; but 
when in 1772 the order was abolished by the decree 
of the Pope, their property amounted to two hundred 
millions of dollars. They had been in existence 
about two centuries and a half. In the state of Paraguay 
the Jesuits set up a patriarchal government about the 
year 1610, and carried it on for a century and a half. 
The people lived in mud hovels, the Jesuits in 
palaces. The people got enough to barely sustain 
nature, the Jesuits took the rest. And when they 
weie abolished, in that little state the one mission of 
San Ignacio Mini was possessed of twenty-seven 
million dollars, and there were thirty such missions 
in Paraguay. Garneau, a Roman Catholic Canadian 
historian, says that the Jesuits are trying to make a 
Paraguay of Canada. 

3. In Canada the order of the Sulpicians is said to 
be richer than the bank of Montreal, which is one of 
the great financial institutions of North America. 
The largest property holder in Montreal, with one 
exception, is the church. The endowments, tithes, 
dues, and so forth of the Roman Catholic Church in 
Canada were estimated fifteen years ago at a capital 
value of fifty millions of dollars. In the province of 
Quebec, property of the church otherwise taxable,, 



Papal Cri^eed of Wealth. 179 

now exempt, is estimated at a hundred million 
dollars. 

4. There have been times in the history of England 
when the revenue of the Pope from England was 
greater than the revenue of the king. That was one 
thing which caused the quarrel between the Pope and 
Henry VIII. Henry VIII. wanted the revenues for 
himself. You know the Papists are always affirming 
that Henry VIII. was a desperately bad character, 
who broke with the papacy because he wanted to 
divorce his wife and marry another, and they assume 
great virtue to the Pope as denying the divorce. 
But the truth is, the papal legate came to England 
with the permission for divorce in his pocket, which 
the Pope was willing to give for a consideration ; but 
Henry would not pay the consideration, ^nd took the 
matter into his own hands, declaring his independence 
of Italian control. 

Where the church is rich, as I have often said, the 
people are poor. There is a current proverb in 
Mexico, that all the small change of the state goes 
into the open door of the church. I need not ad- 
dress myself to the task of proving the poverty of 
the people of those countries where the church is 
powerful. For later I shall show that in the mat- 
ter of real estate, the Roman Catholic Church has 
seized and held so much, that almost every natior 
in the world has been compelled to confiscate her 
property for the sake of the people. What I have 
already said is merely preliminary to a further ques- 
tion, which is this : — 

II. By what means did the church gain this wealth ? 



180 Papal G-reed of Wealth. 

How did the papal government come to be so rich ? 
How did it become a " shop " to the Italians, and a 
" silver religion " to the French ? I answer, by what 
it sold. But some one may object, " It is harsh to 
affirm that the church has made sale of sundry spirit- 
ual privileges, offices, relics, and the like ; say, rather, 
that the people gave these benefits to the church in 
gratitude for what the church gave to them." But the 
money has been forced from the people by threaten- 
ing, bargaining, and deception. It has not been a 
free-will offering. The Roman Catholic Church 
(though it did not deliver the goods) has sold sal- 
vation to millions of people for centuries of time, 
and does so to-day. In confirmation of this let me 
speak somewhat in detail of the facts. 

I. There is scarcely anything related to religion of 
which a Roman Catholic becomes possessed without 
paying something. 

1. Beginning with infancy, baptism is conferred 
at a price. I do not know what the fees are in all 
parts of the world, but I have here what are called 
the '' Faculties of a priest," really a license, or certif- 
icate, to perform the functions of a priest, in Ottawa, 
Canada, in which the fee for baptism is set at one 
dollar ; and it is directed that for this and other ser- 
vices he shall send what fees he collects regularly to 
the bishop, if he expects to retain what are called 
" these faculties." In a neighboring town, a man 
tells me he paid five dollars for his child's baptism, 
and was told that ten would be more acceptable. 

2. After his baptism, as the Roman Catholic grows 
up, the thing which is sold to him oftenest is the 



Papal G-reed of Wealth. 181 

mass or masses. What are these ? In brief, they 
say that the consecrated wafer becomes the body, 
blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, and this 
they sell for a price. When a Roman Catholic dies, 
his friends are told that he has gone to Purgatory, a 
place of suffering. The question of how to get him 
out is a question which the priest answers. It is by 
having some priest manufacture God in the mass 
many times, and offer the same as a sacrifice. In 
proportion to the amount of money paid is the num- 
ber of masses said. Christina, Queen of Spain, re- 
cently left enough for five thousand masses for herself, 
and five thousand for her husband. Thus rich people 
have a good deal better chance than poor people to 
get out of Purgatory. 

In the Assembly of Florence in 1787, a Roman 
Catholic divine alleged that the number of privileged 
altars and masses in the diocese of Florence empow- 
ered to release one soul from Purgatory at each cele- 
bration, was so large, apart from the vast number of 
plenary indulgences, as to exceed the ratio of deaths 
each day, while the same proportion held good 
throughout the whole Catholic world. Therefore, 
there must be a surplus of masses. Purgatory must 
be empty, and the indulgences are a long way in 
advance of any possible demand on its space. And 
yet, the priests continually tell their people that 
Purgatory is full, and getting out is very uncertain. 
Moreover, a high mass costs variously, sometimes ten, 
sometimes twenty-five dollars ; a low mass cost in 
Canada, the last I knew, a dollar. So many of these 
masses are sold for souls in Purgatory, that the 



182 Papal G-reed of Wealth. 

priests in Canada and the United States cannot say 
them all, for generally a priest is permitted to cele- 
brate only one mass in a day. So the masses for 
which these Canadian and American priests get a 
dollar, they send to the poor priests on the Continent 
of Europe, who agree to say them for twenty-five 
cents, while these home priests keep the other seven- 
ty-five cents, which is a very fair commission. 
(Laughter.) In 1889 the poorer class of priests in 
Rome made a protest, very like a " strike," because 
the price of a mass was reduced from twenty to 
sixteen cents. They appealed to the people to help 
them in their fight for the other four cents, and the 
people laughed, which was a very proper thing to 
do. It seems very much like selling Christ, does it 
not, to say with the priest, "I now make Christ for 
your friend in Purgatory for one dollar, or for twenty- 
five dollars, or for twenty-five cents, as the case 
may be? I offer him up — that is, I eat him up, 
and that soul in Purgatory is helped on the way 
out." Judas Iscariot was reverent when he sold 
Christ compared with these. (Applause.) 

3. Closely related to the masses are what are 
known as indulgences. These are in brief, a remis- 
sion of the temporal and Purgatorial penalties of 
sin. Indulgences do not promise, generally, to save 
people from final perdition if they are persistently 
bad, though indulgence sellers have repeatedly 
promised this ; but all along the road after death, 
indulgences are supposed to be very helpful. This 
whole matter of indulgences is very fully discussed in 
a most extraordinary pamphlet which I hold in my 



Papal Q-reed of Wealth. 18 



Q 



hand, written by the very eminent historian, Henry 
C. Lea. It is entitled, " Indulgences in Spain," and is, 
as are all of Mr. Lea's studies, a most careful citation 
of original documents and undeniable authorities. 
Here we learn that indulgences were frequently sold 
on the credit system ; but they did not help the buyer 
unless he intended to pay. If a person gets an 
indulgence by misrepresenting the amount of prop- 
erty which he has, if he is rich, and ought to pay 
more, and says he is not rich, and pays less, the 
indulgence is not good for anything. This is a 
shrewd way of getting a high price for spiritual 
goods. We find Pope Boniface IX. selling indul- 
gences, and then withdrawing them and selling them 
over again, which is a somewhat singular way to 
speculate. Pius VII., as late as 1778, sold these 
indulgences in Spain, and to this very day they are 
freely sold there. The opponent of* Martin Luther, 
Hieronymus Emser, admits that priests and monks 
were " greedy and shameless in their sale of indul- 
gences," which is perfectly obvious to everybody. 
The profits of these sales were enormous. Henry 
TV. of Castile received in four years, as profit on the 
indulgences sold in his kingdom, one hundred million 
dollars. In 1519 Leo X., trafficking with the Spanish 
king, agreed to take twenty-four thousand ducats a 
year as his share of the profits of sales in that realm. 
Charles V. had a sharp conflict with Popes Leo and 
Adrian as to the price of a Bull of Indulgence which 
he desired them to issue for his dominions. They 
wanted two hundred thousand ducats a year, which 
he said he would not pay, and finally they comprom- 
ised on a smaller sum, and issued the Bull. 



184 Papal Greed of Wealth. 

I might read from the reports of the ambassadors 
of Venice at the Spanish court of the enormous 
revenues annually received for the sale of indul- 
gences, sometimes as high as six hundred thousand 
ducats a year, which was divided between the church 
and state. Philip II. of Spain, who received as 
a part of his income the wealth of this Wes- 
tern Continent, obtained about as much money for 
the sale of indulgences to his people as from taxes 
and the discovery of gold in the New World. The 
traffic in indulgences was thoroughly organized, its 
officers consisting of delegates, commissioners, receiv- 
ers, treasurers, preachers, and other officials. The 
preachers, who were to persuade the people to take 
indulgences, were paid by a commission on their 
sales. They were selected for their ability, and were 
compelled to do their utmost to sell, for if the 
preacher failed, to go to a village where he might 
have gone, he was fined thirty ducats ; and if a pastor 
was remiss in inviting these pardoners, as they were 
called, to come to his diocese, he was excommunicated. 
Merchants and bankers made advances on indul- 
gences which were to be sold, and were in the hands 
of the government, precisely as financiers now make 
advances on bonds as collateral. The territory over 
which these preachers were sent was divided into 
circuits. When a bull had been sold it could not be 
taken back, though the buyer might wish to return 
it ; and if a seller took it back, he was fined thirty 
ducats for so doing. When the travelling salesmen 
came to a town to preach about indulgences, and to 
urge the people to buy them, all business was sus- 



Papal G-reed of Wealth. 185 

pended. This suspension was enforced, though a 
great hardship. Everybody was compelled to go and 
hear, and every effort was made to compel them to 
buy. If anybody failed to leave his work and go 
and listen to the preacher who solicited him to buy 
indulgences to get his friends out of Purgatory, or to 
save himself from Purgatory, he was excommuni- 
cated. 

These bulls were so valuable as property that 
great pains were taken to keep from counterieiting 
them, as in the case of bank-notes. They were made 
in the monasteries, and very carefully guarded. 
Among the abuses in connection with their sale, we 
have the fact that the people were often compelled 
to take them for fear of the Inquisition, the con- 
fessors making it necessary for them to buy, with the 
alternative of being denounced to the inquisitors. 
Great and sore poverty came upon the people as a 
result, and when, because too poor to pay cash, the 
people were compelled to buy on credit, the most 
pitiless rigor was exercised in enforcing payment 
from them. A whole community would be put 
under an interdict; that is, all excommunicated, 
if there were people in it who had bought indul- 
gences and had not paid, or could not pay. The 
property of the officers of the counties, personal and 
public, was seized from them if they did not put 
forth their utmost efforts to make debtors who had 
bought indulgences pay the debt. Intermitted for a 
time, in 1720 the whole machinery was restored. 
Again, in 1802, the most active efforts were made to 
enforce it. The business was renewed by Pius IX., 



186 Papal Greed of Wealth. 

the last Pope before the present one, who announced 
a complete exemption from the pains of Purgatory 
for people who would take these indulgences. Re- 
peated bulls for the same soul were advised by 
Pius IX., so that they might be sure to be effective. 
Pius IX. granted a bull for this traffic to go on from 
1878 to 1890, and stipulated the money price for this 
concession. In 1859 the revenue was estimated in 
Spain at three million pesetas. The receipts fell off 
in 1874. The present price of an indulgence for the 
poor is fifteen cents ; the same for the dead. For 
the higher classes ninety cents is charged, and for 
retaining unlawful gains, twenty-three cents. And 
from these the gross annual revenue for the living 
and the dead is about three and a half million pesetas, 
the cost in Spain to-day of bulls of indulgence, which 
are sold there now under the sanction of the Roman 
Catholic Church. 

But pardon me if I now leave this interesting sub- 
ject, for if I spend as much time as this ou each of 
their wares, I shall never finish. 

4. Another way which they have of insuring sal- 
vation is by jubilees. The first jubilee was appointed 
by the Pope in 1340, and they have kept them up for 
revenue ever since. The jubilee was originally in- 
tended to occur at the expiration of each one hun- 
dred years, but the first jubilee brought the church 
so much money that they reduced the time to fifty, 
then to thirty-three, and then to twenty-five years, 
and having had a jubilee in 1851 they had another in 
1857, an interval of only six years. At the first 
jubilee a million and a quarter pilgrims went to 



Papal Greed of Wealth. 187 

Rome. For what did they go? Because at that 
time the Pope sent word to all the world that no 
indulgences would be granted to people unless they 
came to Rome to get them, and all churches which 
had special power, under the church law, to sell in- 
dulgences were denied that privilege during the year 
of jubilee. At that jubilee, in the shrines of St. Peter 
and St. Paul, there were deposited, says Cardinal 
Capitan, fifty thousand gold florins in coppers, obvi- 
ously the gifts of the poor. From this you may 
judge what was given by the rich. Everybody who 
lived in the vicinity of Rome was expected to stay in 
the city thirty days, those who came from a distance 
to stay fifteen days, and of course all that they spent 
in the city was for the enriching of the papal power. 
Persons who could not go to Rome in the year of 
jubilee must pay as much money to the Pope as they 
would have spent in going to Rome, and agents were 
sent out all over Europe to collect the money which 
these people would have spent in going to Rome. 
The effect of these pilgrimages on the morals of the 
people was horrible. No picture can ever be painted 
which will truly reveal what a sink Rome became in 
the years of jubilee. Still this is even yet a papal 
method of raising money by promising salvation. 

Other pilgrimages to various places are made use 
of in the same way. Lourdes in France, Knock in 
Ireland, and in Canada whither the famous relic of , 
which we were talking last Sunday has gone to the 
shrine of St. Anne de Beaupre, are all encouraged by 
the church as places of pilgrimages, so as to make 
money out of pilgrims who throng to them. 



188 Papal Greed of Wealth 

These sales I have called the sale of salvation, 
because baptisms, masses, and indulgences are deemed 
essential to salvation. 

II. But, similar to these, there are sales which I 
may call privileges, which are not immediately, 
though secondarily, connected with salvation. 

1. Among the privileges which the Church of 
Rome sells freely are marriage dispensations. There 
are certain kinships, or blood relationships, that people 
sustain one to the other, which make it impossible for 
them to marry unless the church permits them so to 
do, by granting a dispensation. Nevertheless, any 
one can marry whomsoever he likes, provided he buys 
the privilege of the Pope. Bishop Scipio de Ricci, 
of Italy, says that the whole business is " a shameful 
traffic." The Council of Trent decreed that a "Pope 
can dispense in any degree of relationship, whether 
it is forbidden by the divine law or not." I hold in 
my hand a copy of the rules relating to marriage dis- 
pensations in Ottawa, Canada. If you want to marry 
your first cousin, or your second cousin, or your aunt 
or your uncle, or any other relative, I can tell you 
just how much it would cost you there. I read from 
the Faculties of a priest, granted him in 1874 : — 

Index of fees for dispensations of matrimony in the 
diocese of Ottawa. 

For dispensation of 1 of the banns $2.00 

" " "2 " " 4.00 

" " " 3 *' " 10.00 

" " " 4th degree of consanguinity and 

affinity 10.00 

*' " " the 4th degree simple, with the 

3d degree of mixed consan- 
guinity and affinity .... 12.00 



Papal Greed of Wealth. 189 

For dispensation of 4th degree with the 3d mixed . 11.00 

" " "3d degree simple 14.00 

" " " 3d degree mixed 18.00 

" " "3d degree mixed with the 2d . 24.00 

'' '* " 2d simple 40.00 

** " " impediment of spiritual affinity 4.00 

" " " " " public decency 2.00 

(I should think the whole matter of dispensations 
at a price would come under that head, — impedi- 
ment of public decency.) (Laughter and applause.) 

For dispensation of impediment of prohibited time 4.00 

This note is appended in Latin (I read the transla- 
tion). " The fees for these dispensations shall be 
sent promptly every year to the secretary of the 
bishop." When Prince Amadeo, the brother of the 
present King of Italy, desired to marry his niece a 
few months ago, he paid the Pope twenty thousand 
dollars, according to current report, to get the privi- 
lege, or dispensation. 

2. Another privilege which they have on sale is 
that of getting out from under the excommunication 
when you are under it. Frederick of Trinacria paid 
Boniface VIII. one thousand ounces of gold to be 
relieved from the ban. The Emperor Frederick 11. 
paid Gregory IX. one hundred thousand ounces of 
gold. The pious zeal of this Pope was followed by 
Clement V., who fulminated a bull of excommuni- 
cation of quite unexampled character against the 
Republic of Venice for having refused to pay him 
fealty in the form of twenty thousand ducats, for the 
city and province of Ferrara it had lately conquered. 
They finally gained relief from that excommunica- 



190 Papal Greed of Wealth. 

tion by paying the Pope a hundred thousand ducats. 
So you see the excommunication business was made 
very fruitful of gain. I suppose there are many 
people in this city this very day who, rather than be 
excommunicated by the church, would pay all they 
are worth, such is their horror, their superstitious 
horror, of the power of the Pope. (Sensation.) 

3. Still farther, as related to marriage, we have 
seen that large fees have been exacted by priests in 
different countries, so that people of necessity must 
remain unmarried until governments relieved them 
by passing civil marriage laws. In Chili, as I told 
you, they were twenty-five dollars, reduced by the 
government to twenty-five cents. They were so high 
in Paraguay that only three legitimate children were 

, born out of every hundred when the Jesuits con- 
trolled everything. What the present fee is in the 
American States I do not know exactly. But we 
know that all other than churchly marriages are cursed 
by Rome, so that the priests may keep the revenue 
they demand. 

4. The canonization of saints is costly. The 
Chevalier Gay says in his little pamphlet on the 
Future of Romanism, that it costs about ten thou- 
sand dollars to be canonized as a saint. I should 
think it would cost a great deal more than that in 
most cases. Ten thousand dollars in money added 
to such characters would scarcely gild them. 

5. There is another kind of taxation which has 
been rife in the church at various times, called the 
penitential taxes. For these taxes, privileges of 
committing certain crimes are granted. There is a 



Papal G-reed of Wealth. 191 

well-known papal tax-list which absolves men from 
various kinds of crime (eighteen different kinds are 
mentioned), provided they pay a penitential tax, so- 
called, to the Pope. These crimes include simony^ 
murder by a priest, parricide, incest, arson, and so 
forth. 

The German Roman Catholic princes in the days 
of Adrian VI. complained in reference to the state 
of things in Germany, which resulted from these 
methods of relieving people of sin. In an appeal 
called the " Hundred Grievances of the German 
Nation," sent forth by the Diet of Nuremberg in 1523, 
they desired the Pope to notice, " How license to sin 
with impunity is granted for money. How more 
money than penitence is exacted from sinners. How 
bishops extort money from the concubinage of priests." 
They declared, " that by means of these purchasable 
pardons, not only are past and future sins of the living 
forgiven, but also those of such as have departed 
this life and are in the purgatory of fire, provided 
only something be counted down. Every one, in 
proportion to the price he had expended in these 
wares, promised himself impunity in sinning. Hence 
came fornications, incests, adulteries, perjuries, homi- 
cides, thefts, rapine, usury, and a whole hydra of 
evils." These Roman Catholics and princes thought 
the papal methods bad for the morals of the people, 
and prove it by much more in exact accord with 
the quotation just cited. 

It has always been true that the papacy has per- 
mitted people who make gain unlawfully to keep it, 
provided they pay a certain tax. I find, for instance, 



192 Papal Greed of Wealth. 

that moneys obtained for false witness, for cheating 
in gambling, for cheating in weights and measures, 
money obtained under false pretences, the wages of 
prostitution, and many other things were permitted 
to be kept, provided the person who had these unlaw- 
ful gains would pay a tax to the church. This is so 
well substantiated that it is beyond doubt or ques- 
tion. It is interesting to know that two very able 
authors, among the best in the Old World and the 
New, tell us that the robbers of the Campagna were 
in league with the priests, and paid to the church a 
portion of the fruits of their robberies for the absolu- 
tion which they received. 

6. A recent traveller in Mexico tells us, that in 
Guadalupe the beggars go to the priests with a part 
of what they gain by begging, and in that way keep 
on good terms with them. The priests are their 
partners. And why are you shocked at that? 
What do the professional Roman Catholic beggars in 
America do with what they get? What do the 
black-hooded nuns who come into your stores do with 
the fruits of their begging ? They certainly do not 
spend it on dress, and by their features I should 
judge they do not spend it on food ; but these pro- 
fessional beggars, of whom this country is getting too 
full, are begging for the church, for the priests. In 
the city of Washington they have the run of the 
departments ; they can go where you could not go, 
soliciting the clerks, the employees of the govern- 
ment, everybody, to give money. It is said by one 
who has given the subject close investigation, that if 
any clerk in Washington refuses money for the 



Papal Q-reed of Wealth, 193 

papacy when these black-hooded nuns ask it, he is 
a marked man, and often is suddenly discharged be- 
cause he has offended them, and for no other known 
reason. ^ It is further said that scarcely does a con- 
gressman arrive in Washington before he is set upon 
by them, with the determination to extort money from 
him. Does this startle you ? Why ? There are 
merchants in Worcester who would not dare to turn 
these same beggars out of their stores without giving 
them what they ask, for fear of the boycott. (Loud 
applause.) So when I state that the beggars of 
Guadalupe in Mexico are said to be in league with 
the priests, I have simply gone too far out of our 
country to find my illustration, for the Romish beg- 
gars of this city do it, the beggars of Massachusetts, 
of the United States. 

7. Lotteries, jou know, are pronounced criminal 
by the laws of this government. We have just had 
a great struggle over the Louisiana lottery, because it 
was debauching the whole country, and have forced 
that gigantic scheme of robbery to discontinue its 
work. But lotteries are everywhere operated by the 
Roman Catholic Church, as in Mexico and Canada. 
In Peru, also, the bull-fights and cock-fights are some- 
times used as a means of obtaining money under 
churchly sanction. In Canada millions of dollars' 
worth of lottery tickets are sold by the church. I 
have seen one of those tickets within the last four 
years, bought by a friend at a church door in Mon- 
treal. The Grand Lottery of the Sacred Heart, 
fifteen years ago, was offering $272,782 annually in 
prizes. A special lottery charter is granted by the 



194 Papal Greed of Wealth. 

Dominion Parliament to the province of Quebec for 
church and educational or charitable purposes. Such 
associations being classed as criminal under the gen- 
eral law of the Dominion ! Rome is privileged in 
crime by this enactment. Lotteries are all con- 
demned by the law of the United States, but when 
do the Roman Catholic Churches have a fair in this 
city or State without lotteries and gambling ? There 
is in their methods as much chance as there is in any 
game at cards. A distinguished priest in our city 
puts up his trotting horse, encouraging his parish- 
ioners to guess on the weight of the horse at so much 
apiece, so getting much more than the value of the 
horse. A cane, a sword, a scarf, a gold watch, any 
one of a hundred things, is used in the raffle, which 
is a lottery on a small scale ; the tickets are sold far 
and wide to get money for the church. And I am 
ashamed to say that Protestant churches will adver- 
tise similar things, — small theatres, cheap shows, and 
the like, take a fee at the door, and degrade public 
sentiment to make money with which to support 
religion ! I should feel freer in talking about the 
lotteries of the Roman Catholic Church if we were 
as pure from kindred methods as we ought to be. 
(Applause.) Perhaps you think I should have fin- 
ished the catalogue of this Romish store and its sales. 
I wish I had, but much more remains to which to 
call your attention. 

8. Amulets, charms, scapulars, medals, are all sold 
to-day for money, in untold quantity. I can give 
you the names of some of them, so that you can buy 
one if you want to. I have not time to describe 



Papal G-reed of Wealth, 195 

their alleged magical powers. The Carmelite scapu- 
lar, the Cord of St. Francis, the Medal of St. Joseph, 
the Medal of St. Benedict, the Agnus Dei, the 
model of St. Peter's chains, the model of a garment 
of the Blessed Virgin, the waters of Lourdes, etc. ; 
while Pius IX. says that a priest can make just as 
good holy water as they can find anywhere, so this is 
also to be sold for its power to charm. 

In the Nev/ York Independent^ within the last year, 
Father Alfred Young, of the Paulist fathers, has 
written column after column to prove that it is right 
and wise to sell medals, which are put in watering 
troughs to keep cattle from getting sick, and to be 
used to protect people from sickness, storms, acci- 
dents, death, etc. All which articles are sold to-day 
in this place and in all places where Rome can keep 
the people ignorant enough to buy them. Father 
Durngoole gained hundreds of thousands of dollars 
for what he calls his children's orphanages, by selling 
these things. He had an annual income equal to 
that of Yale University last year. Did not you sup- 
pose that our generation had outgrown such folly? 
that, unlike the Indian who carries his little fetich, 
we had sense enough to know that a bit of flannel on 
the neck would not save us from being struck by 
lightning? Did you not suppose that we had ad- 
vanced from such infantile superstition ? And yet 
this is part of the religion of the holy Roman Catho- 
lic Church. And I have not the slightest doubt that 
there are people in this audience now with scapulars 
on. (Great sensation.) 

9. But the trade in relics is another part of Rome's 



196 Papal Gi^eed of Wealth. 

store-keeping. Enough of the true cross has been 
sold to make seven or eight large trees, and they in- 
vented the theory that it multiplied like the loaves 
of bread and the fishes. (Laughter.) There are extant 
at least three heads of John the Baptist. There are 
two holy coats ; and it was last year that one of these 
holy coats was worshipped at Treves, and hundreds 
of thousands of pilgrims went to see it, to be healed 
of their disorders. One pope says that this is the 
holy coat, while Argenteuil in France has another 
holy coat. But now I must indulge myself in read- 
ing to you a little about these relics. Last Sunday I 
was speaking to you of the relics of St. Anne dis- 
played in New York. You know that relic has gone 
out of this country to Canada. Is that the reason 
why we have had terrible rain-storms and floods? 
(Laughter.) On yesterday morning we read that 
this relic had brought to the church in New York 
sixteen thousand dollars, and Archbishop Corrigan, at 
whom the mayor of New York looked up from his 
knees on a public platform, says that twenty-five 
thousand people have visited and venerated or wor- 
shipped this relic of St. Anne ! 

But I want you to know just where to go to get 
the best thing in the matter of relics, so I will give 
you some special directions about one famous saint : 
" The body of the Apostle St. Bartholomew is de- 
clared in the Roman Breviary and Martyrology to have 
been translated from Benevento to Rome by the 
Emperor Otto II L and is alleged to be entire. It is 
attested by bulls of Alexander III. and Sixtus V. 
But the church of Benevento alleges that the entire 



Papal Greed of Wealth. 197 

body of St. Bartholomew is there stilly and produces 
bulls to that effect from Leo IX., Stephen IX., 
Benedict XII., Clement VI., Boniface IX., and Urban 
V. (all infallible, you know), the earliest of which 
popes reigned fifty years after the death of Otto III. 
Here, then, are tivo entire bodies ; but Monte Cassino 
claims the possession of a large part of the body, and 
so does Reims. There are, besides, three heads: one 
at Naples, one formerly at Reichenau, and a third at 
Toulouse; two crowns of the head at Frankfort and 
Prague ; part of the skull at Maestricht; a jaw at Stein- 
field; part of a jaw at Prague; two jaws in Cologne, 
and a lotver jaiv at Murbach ; an arm and hand at 
Gersiac ; a second arm., with the flesh, at Bethune ; a 
third arm at Amalfi ; a lai'ge part of a fourth arm at 
Foppens ; a fifth arm and part of a sixth at Cologne ; 
a seventh arm at Andechs ; an eighth arm at Ebers ; 
three la7'ge leg or ar^n bones in Prague ; part of an 
arm at Brussels ; and other alleged portions on the 
body, not reckoning trifles like skin, teeth, and hair, 
in twenty other places." That is the relic business. 
There seems to be a good many of that saint. He 
has heads and arms enough for the Hindoo god. 
(Great laughter.) " Again, that one handkerchief 
with which St. Veronica is said to have wiped the 
face of our Lord, thereby imprinting His likeness 
upon it, is shown in seven different places. They are 
Rome, Turin, Milan, Cadouin, Besancon, Compi^gne, 
and Aix-la-Chapelle. Four papal briefs attest that 
at Turin, and fourteen the one at Cadouin." Our 
historian says, " These are, no doubt, extreme in- 
stances ; but there are many very similar, and they 



198 Papal G-reed of Wealth. 

admirably illustrate the uncertainty of relic-worship ; " 
and yet the church sanctions it. If poor, superstitious 
people were doing it, simply, I should not laugh at 
them : I should be sorry for them ; but the Pope, the 
cardinals, the archbishops, the bishops, the priests, 
know these frauds, and still they perpetrate them on 
the people for money. (Applause.) 

3. A word as to the purchase of officers : — 
III. The archbishops' pallium, which was formerly a 
cloak, but is now a band of woollen, the badge of official 
rank, used to be sold for .thirty thousand gold florins. 
Ever}^ man who came into the archbishopric must 
have a new one. At Salzburg, in the seventeenth 
century, they had to buy the pallium three times, 
because their archbishops died, and it cost them thirty- 
three thousand ducats every time. The city of May- 
ence, from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, 
paid out three millions of florins for the same decora- 
tion. The Council of Basle denounced the whole 
business of pallium selling as illegal. It is carried 
on up to the present time, although no certain price 
is fixed on it as then, but it is awarded, and a present 
is expected, a very thin disguise for bribery and sale. 
It is also true that bishops used to buy promotion, 
and I doubt very much if any bishop gets a place now 
without paying liberally for it. 

2. There was yet another mode of selling the 
Episcopal office. Taking a bishopric now occupied, 
in anticipation of the death of the present incumbent, 
the Pope sells his bishopric to another man, and pos- 
sibly to another while the first is alive, to be entered 
upon at his decease, so that these '' letters of rever- 



Papal Greed of Wealth. 199 

sion" as they were called, were held by many, and by 
all sorts of people who could pay for them. Any- 
body who could pay was an eligible candidate. And 
"letters of reversion " had a market value. 

3. Among the taxes of the church are the tithes, 
which have added much to her revenue, and do still. 
In Canada one twenty-sixth of all grains and farm 
products must go to the church, and the farmer must 
deliver it at the church house. 

The Protestant tenants of Roman Catholics must 
pay this tithe, and if a person does not raise grain he 
must pay in money. 

The church gets a great amount of money from 
celibate priests who, not having relatives, at death 
leave their money to the church. This is one reason 
why they were compelled to be celibates. 

4. Peter's pence is taken to-day. It was an enforced 
tax in England and in all Northern Europe for a long 
time. Every householder had to pay so much to the 
Pope, in proportion to his income. Of late years, we 
have had this matter of Peter's pence re-originated. 
The present Pope having only eleven thousand rooms 
in his house, and about ten or eleven thousand people 
to wait on him, more or less, is so much a prisoner 
that the church is urging to have Peter's pence be 
taken up all over the world ; and considerable of the 
money which you sent to help starving Ireland went, 
no doubt, in the way of Peter's pence to Rome. 
(Applause.) 

5. A great deal of money is obtained through 
forged wills. The history of this mode of making 
gain began early and continues to this day. As early 



200 Papal G-reed of Wealth. 

as 364 the Emperor Valentinian made a law against it. 
The priests used their power at the deathbed to secure 
the valuables and treasures of those whom they con- 
fessed and absolved; and in Roman Catholic countries 
many families are left in poverty by this priestly 
manipulation of estates. 

6. A good deal of the money which the Roman 
Catholic Church is getting in this country is being 
taken out of the treasury of the United States. For 
Indian schools, they have taken in the last few years 
about two millions of dollars. The utmost that has 
been taken by other bodies is as follows : The Pres- 
byterians have taken two hundred and eighty-six 
thousand ; the Congregationalists one hundred and 
eighty thousand ; the Episcopalians one hundred and 
two thousand ; the Friends one hundred and forty 
thousand ; the Methodists thirty-three thousand ; 
while the Baptists (God bless them !) have never taken 
a cent — not a cent. (Applause.) One of the no- 
blest things in the history of the Baptist Churches in 
this country is that, determined to keep church and" 
State separate, they have refused the bribe which has 
been offered them, and have never taken one dollar 
from the treasury of the United States for Indian 
contract schools. Last week the Methodist General 
Conference, representing this great church, much 
larger than the Roman Catholic, having taken inadver- 
tently thirty-three thousand dollars of government 
money for Indian schools, — the General Conference 
unanimously declared that they never would take 
another dollar. (Applause.) It will be only a little 
while before the other churches do the same. And 



Papal Greed of Wealth, 201 

you observe Romanism has taken nearly three times 
as much as all the other churches put together out of 
the United States Treasury. 

7. Another way by which they are getting money 
is from the public-school funds. In these cases the 
church takes the money which is paid to the teachers, 
and as a result is greatly enriched thereby. Only the 
too great length of the present address prevents my 
showing you how they are receiving public funds for 
the support of Roman Catholic parochial schools. 
The reformatories and orphanages of the church, 
wherever the State gives them money, are money- 
making institutions : a very small part goes to the 
support of the orphans, and a very large part to the 
support of the priesthood. 

I have but a moment in which to draw the lesson 
from these facts. Simon the Sorcerer was innocent 
compared with the papacy. All I have not told you, 
for want of opportunity. But I wanted you to know 
of just what the Roman Catholic Church is making 
the sales, by means of which she has gathered her 
enormous wealth in this and other countries. I want 
to ask you if you think this organization is the 
Church of Christ ? In the Protestant church I know 
of notliing which is sold except the pews, and I think 
there is a growing feeling against this. This is also 
done in the Roman Catholic Church. No Protestant 
minister insists on even a marriage fee ; he takes 
whatever is given him, without comment, and some- 
times he gets nothing at all. Sometimes he gets a 
handsome fee, but in every case it is voluntary. But 
all baptisms, all funerals, all visitations, are entirely 



202 Papal Greed of Wealth, 

free. The finances of Protestantism seem to me in 
general to be managed honestly and after a spirit 
which is in total contradistinction to that of the 
Roman Catholic Church. You and I are called upon 
to judge whether with our consent this church, with 
these methods of defrauding the people and leaving 
them in poverty, ought to be dominant and come to 
supremacy in this country. My purpose here to-day 
has not been to ridicule the people who are the 
dupes of priests, but to awaken at once your grati- 
tude to Almighty God for your better estate, and your 
most strenuous efforts that the people who are being 
bled of such vast sums of money may, by the diffusion 
of knowledge and truth, be delivered from superstition 
and bondage into the glorious liberty of the children 
of God. (Applause.) 



GOVERNMENTS COMPELLED TO CONFIS- 
CATE THE PROPERTY SEIZED BY 
THE PAPAL CHURCH. 



Of those who obtain money by fraud and by wrong- 
doing, the Bible speaks thus in the Epistle of St. 
James, at the beginning of the 5th chapter, " Go to 
now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries 
that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted 
and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and 
silver is cankered ; and the rust of them shall be a 
witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it 
were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the 
last days. 

" Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped 
down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, 
crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are 
entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Ye 
have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton ; 
ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaugh- 
ter. Ye have condemned and killed the jast; and he 
doth not resist you. 

" Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of 
the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the 
precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for 

203 



204 government Confiscation. 

it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye 
also patient ; stablish yonr hearts : for the coming of 
the Lord draweth nigh." 

Slowly but surely God rights the wrongs of this 
world : slowly but certainly the plunderers of man- 
kind are forced to give up their ill-gotten wealth: 
glowly, but without fail, the thrones of tyranny are 
undermined, and slaves become freemen. Of this we 
have illustrations on every hand, none more manifest 
than in the history of the gathering and the dispersion 
of the wealth of the great ecclesiastical organization 
whose spirit we are considering. 

In the former discourse, I detailed the various re- 
ligious privileges, advantages, and offices for which the 
priest receives money, including taxes, tithes, seizures, 
etc., through disposing of which, during all these 
centuries, the papal church has acquired wealth. 
The impression created upon your minds by the some- 
what extended description of their methods must have 
been, first, that the papacy has many and very ex- 
traordinary ways of getting hold of the money of the 
people ; secondly, that many of its devices are clearly 
and scandalously fraudulent; but thirdly, that not- 
withstanding the unjustifiableness and the dishonesty 
of their methods, they have nevertheless so far de- 
ceived society as to have acquired enormous wealth. 
None of those things of which I spoke to you on last 
Sabbath, for which the papacy receives money, are 
properly salable ; neither baptisms nor marriage dis- 
pensations, nor masses nor indulgences ; while peni- 
tential taxes, lotteries, amulets, charms, medals, 
scapulars, and relics are obviously worthless frauds 



Government Confiscation. 205 

on the ignorant. At the close of the last service a 
gentleman handed to me a Roman Catholic medal 
which some one had given to him. A friend, formerly 
a Roman Catholic, to whom I showed it, said, "I 
wore one of those for years." The aggregate of ma- 
terial and art spent on that medal would not be worth 
more than a cent — I should think they ought to be 
bought two for a cent — (laughter), but probably 
twenty-five or fifty cents was paid for such a medal, 
and the profits went into the treasury of the church. 
There are other things mentioned in the previous dis- 
course where the disproportion of value is infinitely 
greater ; where the thing sold is worth absolutely less 
than nothing, and where the price paid is very great : 
the people would in every way be better off without 
any of those things. (Applause.) And I raise the 
question here to-day whether the priests in such 
transactions are not evidently obtaining money under 
false pretences. That question has been judicially 
raised in Italy, and I think will ultimately be con- 
sidered all over the world. 

1. For example, is it not plainly a fraud, an in- 
tended fraud, to take money for masses and indul- 
gences for souls in purgatory, even when the priests 
believe in purgatory ? We have the fact beyond all 
question that many of the masses promised and paid 
for are never said. This has been proven in the 
French courts. The priests in some countries, unable 
to say all the masses which they promise to say, farm 
them out, and those to whom they send them, who 
agree to say them, fail to do it. What is the attitude 
of the church toward those who have thus paid for 



206 G-overnment Confiscation. 

masses and not received them? Does she reimburse 
them? Never. She has deceived the people with 
false representations, and appropriated their money. 
Moreover, remember the fact which was mentioned 
before, that more masses are agreed to be said than 
there are persons who die. Therefore there are more 
masses promised than there is any need of, even for 
those who believe in purgatory. How can a church, 
if it professes any honesty, take money for more 
masses than as many as would professedly take out 
of purgatory the people who are in it? Moreover, 
when the masses are said, they are frequently, as I 
have many a time seen, said with a levity which 
verges on blasphemy. Go into the churches in 
France and Italy, where the poor priests are saying 
masses for the souls, perhaps, of the people of this 
city, and you will observe that the priest is dirty, his 
mien is careless, the boys about him who are helping 
him are often full of laughter and mischief, and 
there is nothing to suggest, even if one believed in 
the mass, that the intention of the priest is such as to 
make it avail anything. Surely, if fraud was ever 
manifest, it is proven in cases like this. 

2. It is equally true that money is obtained on 
false pretences for the relics, medals, amulets, charms, 
which are useless, foolish, and valueless, and known 
to be so by the people who sell them. Do you doubt 
the fact that Archbishop Corrigan knew concerning 
the so-called relic of St. Anne first, that it was no 
part of the body of the late St. Anne ; second, that 
there probably never was such a person as this St. 
Anne ; and third, that it could not by any means do 



Government Confiscation. 207 

a particle of good to the people who worshipped it? 
You know and I know that Archbishop Corrigan and 
the priests of New York must, in reason, perfectly well 
understand that this relic and its exposure was fraud 
and folly from beginning to end. Yet they took six- 
teen thousand dollars from the poor, ignorant people 
for looking upon and venerating it in the city 
of New York, knowing perfectly, so far as can be 
seen, that they were robbing them and giving them 
no value for their money. This goes on incessantly, 
under papal sanction. 

The same may be said of the scapulars and the 
medals, the amulets and the charms, the strings, the 
girdles, and the rosaries which are constantly sold 
within the Roman Catholic Church. Those who sell 
them can but know that they are not good for any- 
thing : those who buy them do not. I believe, there- 
fore, that they are legally liable for action to recover, 
as selling things under false pretences. 

3. At the same time the taxes, tithes, and moneys 
from public treasuries are used, as many cases show, 
for the hurt and disadvantage of the people whose 
money is taken from them. Within the last week in 
the current news, — not in Worcester papers, I be- 
lieve, but in papers Avhich give us the news, — it has 
been stated that in the city of New York an orphan- 
age or protectory has been drawing money from the 
State for children who are not in the orphanage, and 
never were. They have one hundred and ten dollars 
a year for every child whom they support ; but it is 
charged that they have counted falsely, and taken 
money for children who never were in their institu- 
tion. Is not that fraud ? If not, what is it ? 



208 Government Confiscation. 

I. There are other fraudulent methods by which 
the papacy gains wealth besides those which I men- 
tioned two weeks ago. You have all heard of the 
temporal power of the Pope. The temporal posses- 
sions of the Pope included the city of Rome and 
adjacent territory, and in earlier centuries a very 
large amount of territory in the central, southern, and 
northern portions of Italy. The loss of the temporal 
power of the Pope has been the subject of a great 
deal of animated protest among Roman Catholics for 
the last twenty years, and at the Baltimore Centennial, 
in 1889, the entire Congress of American Catholics 
protested that the Pope ought to have restored to him 
his temporal power. Moreover, conventions are en- 
couraged and held in many places in Europe in the 
interest of the restoration of the temporal power ; 
that is, of the territory which the Pope as prince once 
owned and ruled over. The temporal power, that is 
to say the territory over which the Pope ruled, was 
originally obtained by the most barefaced fraud on 
the part of the popes and priests. What was the 
method of that fraud ? 

1. Why, in the middle of the eighth century, the 
pope of Rome brought forward a document which he 
declared had been given by Constantine the Great, 
granting to the Pope certain territory and possessions. 
That document, the alleged donation of Constantine, 
was a forgery. There is not a Roman Catholic histo- 
rian to-day who dares defend it, and yet the whole 
fabric of the papal temporal power was built up 
upon it. Concerning this great deception, I quote 
from a work of great reliability wherein Dr. Dol- 



Grovernment Confiscation. 209 

linger says, '' That previous to the middle of the 
eighth century there is not a trace to be found of the 
donation which has since become so famous." And 
he shows that while from time to time many canonists 
and theologians have maintained its verity, in order to 
found upon it a universal dominion of the Pope, yet 
that after Baronius, one of the most distinguished of 
the church annalists, pronounced it a forgery, " all 
these voices which had shortly before been so numer- 
ous and so loud became dumb." The fact is, that no 
writers who have proper regard for their veracity 
now maintain the truthfulness of this donation of 
Constantine. Dean Milman calls it " a deliberate 
invention," a '' monstrous fable," and a " forgery as 
clumsy as it is audacious," Reichel characterizes it 
'' as an ignorant blunder and a falsehood — a falsehood, 
however, let it be borne in mind, which faithfully re- 
flects the thoughts and feelings of the age which gave 
it birth." So just as though a forged deed or a 
forged will had been made the basis of an individual's 
possession of any property, the forged '' Donation " 
was made the basis of the temporal power which 
all Romanists to-day are complaining has been taken 
from the papacy which stole it. (Applause.) 

2. Add to this that by means of a most extraordinary 
forgery, the papacy obtained from Pepin, King of 
France, twenty cities in the year 754. How was 
that done ? Let me read from Dr. Littledale, a dis- 
tinguished Chui^ch of England clergyman, and a 
writer of equal learning and candor, whose " Plain 
Reasons against joining the Church of Rome " you 
would do well to read. '• In 754 Pope Stephen III. 



210 Government Confiscation. 

forged a letter (still extant) in the name of the 
Apostle St. Peter, and sent it to Pepin, King of 
France, calling on him to come to the defence of the 
Pope and the city of Rome against the Lombards, 
which he accordingly did, and bestowed on the 
Pontiff a great territory, containing more than twenty 
cities, the first beginning of the temporal power. 
Fleury, in recording this event, describes it as an 
artifice without parallel before or since in church 
history. " That is how the pope first became king." 
To-day I was reading the text of this forged letter 
affirmed by the Pope to have been written by St. Peter, 
the Pope acting as letter carrier between St. Peter 
and. Pepin, and by which he gained the twenty cities ! 
If you desire to see the letter you can find it in 
Bowling's '' History of Romanism," page 169, where 
it is quoted from Bower, who unearthed the whole 
matter from the original manuscript in the Imperial 
library of Vienna (Codex Carolinus, espistle III., 
p. 92). If these were the whole of the papal forgeries 
and deceptions in the matter of landed possessions, 
they would certainly be sufficient to prove that they 
never held the temporal power by any just right. 

3. But, besides, it is generally believed in the case 
of Matilda of Tuscany, who died on the 24th of July, 
1115, and who had been apparently living in unlaw- 
ful relations with Pope Gregory VII. for many years 
(and the proofs seem to me to be adequate), that her 
vast possessions came to be the property of the church 
by the medium of a forged will. For know at least this 
in regard to it : though she died in 1115, nothing what- 
ever is heard of the alleged will when, seven years 



Goverwfhent Confiscation. 211 

later, Pope Calixtus signed the Concordat with the 
German Emperor at Worms ; though at this time, 
had there been any such document, it must surely 
have come to light. Still we know that not a word 
was spoken of this will. It was first mentioned by 
Pope Honorius in 1124, ten years after Matilda's 
death; and finally, Innocent III., who was a mighty 
pope and a great ruler, in 1199, nearly a hundred 
years after the death of the countess, managed to 
get hold of her vast domain by asserting, probably 
falsely, that she had left a will making the Pope her 
heir. Another will probably forged was declared 
to have been given the Roman See by King Louis, 
the son of Charlemagne. Though said to have been 
given in the year 817, it was never heard of until the 
thirteenth century. Four or five hundred years had 
passed when the popes came forward and said that by 
the will of King Louis nearly all of southern Italy 
had been given them. In 817, at the time it was 
alleged to have been given, the territory in question 
was the property of the Emperor of Constantinople. 
So you can see that it was one of the clumsiest of all 
the forgeries, and yet in that age the great authority 
of the popes made this property their own. Those of 
you who have read German and Italian history know 
that habitually the popes fostered all manner of strife 
between princes, in order that they might profit by 
those contentions and so gain the property of the 
princes when they came to a settlement — the old case 
so often repeated in story and proverb of those lawyers 
who, in helping to divide a property, get it all. 

4, This exhibition of fraud and forgery through all 



212 Grovernment Confiscation. 

the history of the church is in entire harmony with 
the whole Roman Catholic system of morality, since 
it abounds in lies. Canon Ffoulkes withdrew from 
the Church of Rome in 1870, and in a series of ser- 
mons telling why he left it, he says, " Gradually the 
conviction dawned upon me that this wondrous sys- 
tem, such as it exists in our day, was a colossal lie, 
a gigantic fraud, a superhuman imposture, the most 
artistically contrived take-in for general credence, for 
lasting hold, for specious appearance, ever palmed 
upon mankind." 

This view he expands and reaffirms Avith an abun- 
dance of facts to demonstrate the truthfulness of his 
words. Let me quote once more from the eminent 
Dr. Little dale, when he says concerning Roman 
Catholic untrustworthiness, " Nevertheless, the Roman 
Church, which professes to worship Him Who has 
said, ' I am the Truth, ' is honey-combed through and 
through with accumulated falsehood : and things 
have come to this pass, that no statement whatever, 
however precise and circumstantial, no reference to 
authorities, however seemingly frank and clear, to be 
found in a Roman controversial book, or to be heard 
from the lips of a living controversialist, can be taken 
on trust : nor accepted indeed without rigorous search 
and verification. The thing may be true, but there 
is not so much as a presumption in favor of its prov- 
ing so when tested. . . . Nor can this be wondered at, 
when it is remembered that Ligouri, the most author- 
itative teacher of morals in the Roman Church, lays 
down that equivocation, of which he specifies three 
kinds, is certainly lawful at all times, and that by the 



Government Oonfiseatmi. 213 

common agreement of all casuists, and may be con- 
firmed with an oath, for a just cause, any cause being 
just which aims at retaining any good things that are 
useful to body or spirit. . . . And this broad fact as to 
. the nature of the now accredited Moral Theology of 
Rome, emphasized by the very low standard of vera- 
city amongst Roman Catholic populations, is the com- 
plete refutation of a claim, often loudly made, that 
the Church of Rome is the one divinely appointed 
channel through which the Holy Ghost exercises His 
functions of Ruler and Teacher." He points us to 
abundant and indisputable proofs from Roman Cath- 
olic authorities, distinctly and unequivocally proving 
that they have falsified history, falsified portions of 
the canon law of the church, falsified the martyrology 
and the fathers, and degraded the system of morality 
to coincide with their practices, and that they have 
built up a structure of untruths which is so monstrous 
that it is not in human power to properly character- 
ize it. " The controversial and theological writings 
of Roman divines perfectly swarm with falsehoods," 
which fact is manifest on every hand. Of Liguori, 
whom Rome by solemn proclamation made a Doctor 
of the Church, classing him with Augustine, Ambrose, 
etc., Dollinger says, " He was a man whose false 
morals, perverse worship of the Virgin, constant use 
of the grossest fables and forgeries, make his writings 
a storehouse of errors and lies." But why expand 
upon an indictment so fully proven ? 

I know not where to begin or where to leave off, 
so abundant are the proofs of the frauds by which 
Rome has built up her power, and gained her riches. 



214 Government Confiscation. 

5. I turn to another volume equally reliable, and 
beg you to notice the following comment on the False 
Decretals : " It is marvellous to contemplate the origin 
and progress of such a structure of fraud and wrong, 
to observe the popular degradation which it wrought 
out, as the means of securing the triumph of the 
papacy, and to see the patience with which the world 
now tolerates the insolent ambition which demands 
its reconstruction in the name of God and humanity. 
This language is not too harsh. The pretence set up 
in these false and forged decrees deserves condemna- 
tion in even harsher and severer terms. They were 
designed to secure to the priesthood the most perfect 
impunity, and to place them so far above the people 
as to put it out of the power of the latter even to 
complain at their oppressions. They allow a bishop 
or ]3riest to commit any crime he pleases, — murder, 
robbery, rape, or seduction, — and deny his responsi- 
bilit}^ to the laws of the country where he resides, or 
to any other law but that which the Pope may enact. 
They command the members of the Roman Catholic 
Church to conceal and cover up whatsoever crimes 
they may commit, rather than bring disgrace upon the 
church. They pronounce as unworthy of belief all 
who are not members of that Church, so as to render 
the conviction of a bishop or priest impossible upon 
their testimony before the court of Rome, even for 
the most outrageous offences. They, in fact, author- 
ize and license whatsoever a bishop or priest shall do, 
although he may drag his clerical robes into the very 
filth and mire of profligacy, prostitution, and vice." 

And every word of this summary is proven by the 



Grovernment Confiseation. 215 

citations and unimpeachable testimonies which pre- 
cede it. 

6. As a further illustration of the method by which 
the papacy obtains property, I might cite the history 
of their getting possession of the Island of Montreal 
in Canada. It was owned by a French gentleman 
named M. de Lauson. The priests went to him and 
told him that they had received a command from 
heaven to establish a hospital on the Island of Mon- 
treal, and sought the cession of it from the owner. 
He declined to let them have it. Whereupon the 
Jesuits invented the story that when Christ said, 
" Where can I find a faithful servant ? " the Virgin 
Mary took one of these priests by the hand and led 
him to the Divine Son, who received him on her 
recommendation, and gave him a ring with an inscrip- 
tion and orders about the community he was to 
establish in Montreal Island. Armed with this 
authority, he was able to so use his influence as to 
persuade the owner of the property to give it up to 
the church. To-day they hold their possessions in 
that city by this barefaced fraud on a superstitious 
man. If it is wrong to take advantage of a child who 
knows nothing, to secure what he has by treachery 
and deceit, then it is wrong for these Roman Catholic 
priests and bishops to gather the rich properties of 
the world into their hands by deceiving the people 
whom they have kept in a state of childhood, denying 
them the cultivation which would. make them able to 
take care of themselves. (Applause.) By such a 
system, by the most persistent and fraudulent ex- 
ercise of it, the Roman priests come to have extraor- 



216 Government Confiscation, 

dinary possessions of houses, lands, and gold in all 
parts of the world. It is said on good authority, 
says ''The American Citizen," that Archbishop 
Williams of Boston has vested in his name twenty- 
one millions iu church property ; the Roman Catholic 
Archbishop in Chicago controls forty-one millions 
of property; the Cleveland bishop, sixteen millions; 
while Archbishop Corrigan holds in his own name 
more than fifty millions of dollars in church property. 

7. The priests make a specialty of becoming con- 
fessors to those who have wealth. Here is a young 
heiress who, it may be, is to have millions as her in- 
heritance. Occasionally we read of such a one sur- 
rendering everything, putting on the robe of a nun, 
and going into a convent. You never see a story like 
this but has a tragedy in it. 

Imagine the slim}- courses, the serpent-like trails, 
the fraudulent procedure, the months and years of 
trickery, by which the astutest men in the world, 
ti"ained especially to influence women, gain the affec- 
tions and confidence of a religious young girl, get 
her to go into a nunnery, and deed her property to the 
church. She may get sick of her attempt to please 
them, may, in fine, leave the nunnery, but she never 
gets back her property. When the renowned nun of 
Kenmare, a most remarkable woman, Miss M. F. 
Cusack, left the Roman Catholic Church, a few 
years since, although she had been distinguished for 
years for her devotion and her works of charity, 
she could not gfet one dollar of the fortune which as 
a guileless girl she had put into the hands of the 
priests when she was deceived into entering the con- 



Grovernment Confiscation, 217 

vent. When the God of justice reckons with those 
who have deceived the young and the innocent and 
have stolen their wealth after this manner, I would 
a thousand times rather be Lazarus than to be a 
bishop, an archbishop, or a pope. (Loud applause.) 

II. Permit me to refer briefly to the enormous 
acquisitions which the Romish Church has gained by 
these means. You will recur to what I have formerly 
stated as to the riches of the papacy, though in 
those statistics I have given you only a glimpse. 
I shall hurriedly, for lack of adequate time, state 
to you, but only suggestively, what they have obtained 
by these means. 

1. As early as the fourth century the greedy priests 
of Italy had gained one-third of the soil of that fair 
peninsula. The jubilee, of which I told you on a for- 
mer occasion, took, it was estimated, one-third of the 
currency of Europe to Rome. Blackstone, the great 
English Jurist, tells us that the Roman Catholic 
priests gained one-third of the property of the British 
Isles. One-fifth of that property was in the hands of 
the monks and nuns. In 1360, says an eminent his- 
torian, the Pope's revenue from England was three 
times that of the king. Not only was this true in our 
mother-land, but it has been true much nearer home. 

2. In Ecuador to-day one-fourth of the property of 
the country belongs to the bishop. There is a Cath- 
olic church for e\evy one hundred and fifty people. 
Ten per cent of the people are priests, monks, or nuns. 
Two hundred and seventy-two days out of the three 
hundred and sixty-five days of the year are feast days 
or fast days. Priests control the government and 



218 Crovernment Confiscation. 

dictate the laws. Three children out of every four 
born are illegitimate. Laborers get from two to ten 
dollars a month. There are no wagons outside of the 
capital city, because there are no roads. There is no 
literature. There is not a mail rout in all the 
country. In Chili one-third of the property belongs 
to the church, and they have a singular way there of 
having the saints nominally hold property. St. Domi- 
nic has an income of more than a million dollars a 
year from his estates, for which he is not taxed a 
penny. The government therefore gets nothing for 
protecting it. The priests get it all. 

In Mexico, in 1857, one-third of the real estate (I 
wish you would take notice of the meaning of these 
figures. 1 am quoting now from the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica) belonged to the church ; also three hun- 
dred seventy-five million dollars' worth of other 
property in that poor little country. A recent trav- 
eller in Mexico says that three-fourths of the prop- 
erty was owned by the priests. 

3. In Canada one-quarter of all the lands was the 
property of the church at the time of the English 
conquest, — that was long ago : more than eight mil- 
lion acres they had gotten into their hands in the 
comparatively brief space of time between the settle- 
ment by the French and the conquest by the Eng- 
lish. There were two hundred and forty convents in 
Canada, of which one hundred and sixty were in 
Quebec, in 1875. Many of them are very rich, all 
of them rapidly growing in wealth. 

The author of "Rome in Canada," page 345, says, 
"If, in spite of the statutes of Mortmain, the English 



Government Confiscation. 219 

monasteries once got within their grasp one-fifth 
part of the lands of the kingdom, what might not 
have been done in Canada before a like restraint was 
put npon the acquisitions of the French clergy? An 
ArrSt of the Council of State, November 26, 1743, 
gives us the answer. In the Declaration of Louis 
XIV. prefixed to the ArrSt, the king, after stating 
what he has done for the religious orders, proceeds to 
tell what they have done for themselves. In virtue 
of their privileges, they had acquired such consider- 
able properties that it became necessary to put a 
limit to their acquisitions; and in the year 1703 
instructions were given that each of the religious 
orders of the West Indies should not be at liberty to 
possess more land than Avould employ one hundred 
negroes. But this restriction, the King distinctly 
states, was disregarded, and a new prohibition was 
issued in the form of letters patent, August, 1721, 
that no acquisition, either of houses or lands, should 
be made by these orders without the king's express 
permission in writing, under penalty of escheat to the 
domain of the crown." 

Remember that the above facts are not exhaustive, 
only illustrative, since the like has been true of all 
other countries of South and Central America, the 
West Indies, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Austria, Poland, 
Bohemia, and Hungary. What a picture you have 
here ! All these vast properties had been taken 
from the people. All claimed and claim exemption 
from taxation ; for, as I shall show you next Sun- 
day, the Roman Catholic Church is everywhere 
absolutely hostile to the taxation of any of its 



220 Government Confiscation, 

estates. All this property, when once obtained by 
the church, is inalienable ; that is, they do not sell 
it. A gentleman in a neighboring city told me that 
within a few months a distinguished bishop, just 
deceased, having bought a tract of property adjacent 
to a gentleman's estate, refused to sell a very small 
slip which would straighten the line between them, 
and would seem to have been of no other value, say- 
ing, "We buy property, but we never sell." All 
these lands and goods of Rome are inalienable, being 
held by the church perpetually for revenue. And in 
all the countries where the papacy has gained this 
enormous wealth, as you know and have often heard, 
the people are poor. 

4. The church's property has given governments 
much concern, because they have been seriously 
embarrassed in carrying on their work by the with- 
drawal of revenues to the church, and every one of 
the countries that I have named has taken occasion to 
look into the matter of church property with a view 
to inquiring how the government could escape from 
the embarrassment of having such vast holdings in 
the hands of a hostile ecclesiastical power. And 
please to take note, that in every case, this movement 
to inquire into the right of the Roman Church to hold 
so great wealth, has been made when the people 
were rising in hope of freedom, and seeking to throw 
off the tyranny of ages. Not the hand of plunder- 
ing rulers has been laid on the church, but the hand 
of an impoverished and indignant people, who, 
struggling for liberty in the midst of awful poverty, 
have found their extortioner and demanded that he 
disgorge his prey. (Applause.) 



Government Confiscation. 221 

III. We come now to the kernel of this discussion. 
The property of the Romish Church, thus acquired, 
has been confiscated by the governments of most 
countries. You may well be startled when I use 
this ominous word, which indicates the hostility of 
the church and the struggle of the State. Such has 
been the insatiable greed of priests and bishops, such 
their enormous acquisitions of land and of wealth, 
that the only recourse of government has been to 
take it away from them by force, since they first took 
it by fraud from the people. 

1. When by various priestly devices great amounts 
of money have been taken from their people, the rulers 
have protested. They have protested because the 
people have been ' impoverished, and the government 
crippled. We may admit that there may be cupidity 
and covetousness on the part of rulers, sometimes 
on the part of peoples, but it is theirs as against 
the greater greed of the prelates of the Romish 
Church. 

Following this protest of governments and peoples 
has come the compulsory seizure of the property of 
the church both by monarchical and popular gov- 
ernments. 

2. In Mexico in 1857, the property of the church 
was taken away by the young republic. In Guate- 
mala, in 1843, their president abolished convents and 
monasteries, and confiscated the property. There 
was a reaction led by the priests and this work was 
overthrown ; but thirty years later, President Bar- 
rios did the same, and in 1873 all the church prop- 
erty of Guatemala passed into the hands of the 



222 Government Confiscation. 

government. In Costa Rica, under President Guardia, 
monasteries and nunneries were confiscated, the arch- 
bishop of the country was expelled, and the confes- 
sional was thrown open, and made public by law 
(would it were so in this country I), and Costa Rica 
took a step forward toward the enfranchisement of 
her people. (Applause.) 

In Venezuela President Blanco did the same. The 
monasteries were turned into hospitals and school- 
houses. They drove out the nuns and the Jesuits, 
threw open the cemeteries to everybody that they 
might bury their dead without priestly interference, 
and turned the great Carmelite monastery into a uni' 
versity. 

In Uruguay the religious houses were abolished on 
account of the treason of their occupants. President 
Santos first established free schools, then civil marriage, 
and when the priests resisted compelled them to cease 
from preaching because they taught treason, and 
then expelled the monks and nuns from the country, 
and gave the property to the people from whom it 
had been stolen. (Applause.) 

3. When in Italy, in 1883, I was told that no new 
monks or nuns wei'e being made throughout the 
country. There were many monasteries which had 
become the property of the government and were 
entirely empty so far as their former tenants were 
concerned. In some monasteries there were old 
monks, supported by the government, permitted to 
live there the remnant of their days, but the able- 
bodied had been sent out to earn their living as 
honest people have to do. So in Italy to-day, because 



Government Confiscation, 223 

the people and their rulers have found it necessary 
in order to give the people a government, the 
monasteries and other religious houses are the prop- 
erty of the state, and no more monks or nuns are to 
be made. In 1889 there was passed in Italy a bill 
called '' Opere Pie," a bill concerning the work of 
piety or beneficence as related to the distribution of 
charitable bequests. Vast funds had been obtained 
by the Roman Catholic Church for the ostensible 
purposes of charity ; but when the government came 
to inquire into the use of these moneys, it found that 
a very large proportion of them remained in the 
hands of the priestly trustees, and was not applied to 
the relief of the people for whom they were originally 
given ; whereupon, in 1889, the government of Italy 
took into its care church property, the income of 
which was twenty-seven millions of dollars, put it 
into the hands of laymen as trustees, and ordered the 
priests to let them alone and keep their hands off, so 
that this income might be given to those for whom 
it was originally left in an honest distribution, as it 
had not been for many years. 

4. It is safe to say that in all these cases of confis- 
cation of church property, the hearts of the people 
are with their rulers : how else could it have been 
done ? And yet I would fain believe that all over 
the world people are growing more truly religious ; 
but the evident justice of getting back what had been 
unlawfully taken from them has grown upon the 
popular mind, until these poor struggling peoples 
have had reason enough to inquire why they should 
be the slaves and why priests should be the masters. 



224 Government Confiscation. 

So they have assisted the government in taking back 
this property, the confiscation of which undoubtedly 
was just. 

IV. Let us now briefly consider why the confisca- 
tion of the property of the Roman Catholic Church 
is based on justice. 

1. There are two grounds on which a government 
may justly take the property of public or private 
owners. First, in war, the property of the enemy 
may be taken in order to weaken the enemy and to 
save the life of the government. This is justified by 
the principle that it is the right of government to 
exist and to destroy the power of its enemies who 
would overthrow it. Moreover, in peace it is right 
and proper for courts representing the government 
to take property which has been obtained under false 
pretences and by fraud and restore it to its rightful 
owners. This right is founded on essential justice. 

2. The confiscation of the Roman Catholic property 
is amply justified by both these principles. For first 
of all, in fact, the church has shown itself to be the 
enemy of the people. No government, in modern 
times, has been so injurious as the rule of the popes 
in Italy and of the priests throughout tlie world. 
Read the history of papal states to prove this affirma- 
tion. Everywhere the attempt to form a free govern- 
ment by and for the people has been met by the 
papacy with opposition and hostility. Therefore, as 
the enemies of free government hostile to the well- 
fare of the people, it has been right for their property 
to be confiscated, that their power of doing harm 
might be weakened. Moreover, in theory, they 



G-overnment Confiscation. 225 

always claim superiority to the civil power; that 
government can set no bounds to their acquisition of 
property ; that civil rulers have no jurisdiction over 
their holdings ; that any jurisdiction on the part of 
the secular government over the possessions of the 
church is a sacrilegious usurpation. So by this 
means, you have in every country where the Roman 
Catholic Church is powerful, a state within a state, a 
power ;ivithin a power, a kingdom within a kingdom, 
and that ecclesiastical kingdom utterly denying the 
jurisdiction of the civil powers over it. If that is 
not treason, tell me what treason is. (Applause.) 

3. Confiscation has been justified, as I have already 
said, by the fact that a very large proportion of the 
property is gained by deceit and fraud. In ordinary 
business, if an article represented to be valuable by 
the seller, is proved worthless by the purchaser, he 
can recover the purchase price ; and under the laws of 
every civilized state, if the Roman Catholics should 
bring action to-day against the priests for the money 
which they have paid for their masses, their indul- 
ences, their marriage dispensations, amulets, scapulars, 
charms, and the like, they ought to recover it by any 
fair application of the laws of equity. (Applause.) 
False representation, fraud, deceit, durance and threat- 
enings, of the Roman Catholic Church should invali- 
date its title to much, if not all, of its property. I think 
I may say from my reading and research, that in all 
the lands where the property of the church has been 
taken by the government, it has been applied for the 
good of the people, and that it is doing much more 
good now than it was in the hands of the priests. So, 



226 Government Confiscation. 

on the one hand, you have the church defrauding the 
people, and on the other the people taking back their 
lawful goods which had been rent from them by the 
church. 

V. May I draw a lesson or two for the information 
of America from facts of such momentous impor- 
tance ? 

1. We cannot thoughtfully suppose that the prob- 
lem of other nations will not become the problem of 
our own government. They are superstitiously blind 
who imagine that America is not to deal with the 
questions which have involved the welfare of all 
other nations. The same conditions prevail in the 
United States of America as have prevailed in other 
lands. The same hierarchy is here, with the same 
principles, the same grasping greed, the same polity, 
the same articles for sale, the same assumptions 'of 
superior rights, the same claims, and the same fraudu- 
lent methods. 

2. The possessions of Romanism in the United 
States of America are very large and rapidly growing. 
The best properties in great cities are continually 
passing into their hands. All over this country they 
are gaining riches by selling all their wares. They 
are also acquiring property by gaining political con- 
trol. An illustration of this is in point. On Fifth 
Avenue, next to the great cathedral in New York, 
opposite the residence of William H. Vanderbilt, is a 
Roman Catholic orphanage, the ground of which is 
worth a great sum of money. It was leased from the 
city some years ago for nine hundred and ninety-nine 
years, at a rental of $1.00 a year. William. H. Vander- 



Grovernment Confiscation. 227 

bilt desired to erect there a museum, and offered at 
once to build the same and to endow it with five 
millions of dollars. The curator of the museum of 
Cambridge, England, said that with five million dol- 
lars' endowment, as proposed by Mr. Vanderbilt, it 
would be the richest museum in the world, and that 
in fifty years the proposed museum would contain all 
the collections and antiquities in the world worth 
having. When Mr. Vanderbilt made the proposition, 
the question was whether the Roman Catholic Church 
would relinquish its hold upon the land. They 
utterly refused so to do. So says the I^ew York Sun,, 
which tells these facts in the issue of December 14, 
1885. That refusal lost to the city of New York the 
finest museum in the world, because the Roman Cath- 
olic Church buys or steals, but never sells. (Applause.) 

3, By votes of moneys obtained from the legislators 
under their control, devoting people's wealth to sec- 
tarian institutions, Romanists are adding very largely 
to their possessions. We have had a fight in the 
Massachusetts legislature during the last winter to 
keep ten thousand dollars out of the Carney Hospital, 
a Roman Catholic sectarian institution, as closely sec- 
tarian as it can well be. Yet I do not know that I 
have seen in a public print of this city of Worcester 
one remonstrance against giving them this large 
amount of the people's money. 

So all over the country, by pressure and threats, 
upon people, papal and Protestant, by holding tena- 
ciously the theory of the non-taxability of their church 
property, by influencing officials so that they keep 
their justly taxable property as far as possible without 



228 G-overnment Confiscation. 

taxation, by all these means, they are gaining great 
wealth in the United States of America. Some limit 
must be put on the rapacity of priests. We have 
public benefactors of great liberality, who are doing 
much for the country, but they are not the prelates 
of Rome. The country will do well while it has time 
and strength to inquire by what right Rome gains 
and holds this great wealth. Not because we desire 
the wealth, but because we want the people to have 
what is their own, we protest against the possession 
of the enormous riches which the Roman Catholic 
Church unjustly is gathering to herself in the United 
States of America. (Applause.) 



TAXATION OF CHUUCH PROPERTY. 



How our Lord Jesus Christ regarded the matter 
of the assessment and payment of taxes to the civil 
government, you may learn from Matthew xvii., be- 
ginning with the 24th verse : " And when they were 
come to Capernaum, they that received tribute money 
came to Peter, and said, Doth not your master pay 
tribute? He saith, Yes. And when he was come 
into the house, Jesus prevented him, saying. What 
thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings of 
the earth take custom or tribute ? of their own chil- 
dren, or of strangers ? Peter saith unto him. Of 
strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Tlien are the chil- 
dren free. 

"Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go 
thou to the sea, and cast a hook, and take up the 
fish that first cometh up ; and when thou hast opened 
his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that 
take and give unto them for me an(i tliee." 

1. In our survey of history we have learned that 
the Roman Catholic Church, by oppression and by 
the most fraudident methods, has obtained from igno- 
rant people an immense and almost unlimited amount 
of wealth. We have also learned that so menacing 

229 



230 Taxation of Church Property, 

have these great possessions become to the nations of 
the world, that in numerous instances the govern- 
ments, after investigating their use, have taken them 
from the church and distributed them, according to 
their best idea of beneficence, among the people. In 
other words, nearly all civilized governments have 
found it necessary to confiscate the property of the 
Roman Catholic Church. We have come to a point 
in our discussion most interesting to us; namely, 
What are we going to do in our own country in 
regard to the property of the Roman Catholic 
Church? Naturally, if we are to save ourselves 
from the disasters and the impoverishment which 
have stricken other lands, we must do something to 
preserve ourselves from falling into the same condi- 
tions. It seems to me that the first thing necessary 
to do in order that our people may not become as 
the people of other lands, is that we, as far as is pos- 
sible, so enlighten them, that they will not pour 
their money into the treasury of the Roman Catholic 
Church ; so that they will not, out of their supersti- 
tion, pay for worthless and useless trumpery those 
vast sums of money which leave them impoverished 
and in many cases a charge upon the State. Our first 
and plainest duty is the enlightenment of the people. 
Our second duty is to restrain by direct means the 
rapacity of the priests. 

2. How this can be done is a question of the great- 
est importance ; and in order that we may erect a safe- 
guard between the priests and the people whom they 
despoil, I am inclined this afternoon to assert and 
to maintain the g-eneral principle that it is our duty, 



Taxation of Church Property. 231 

and indeed our only recourse as a nation, to tax the 
property of the Roman Catholic Church. 

The general matter of taxation is one of very pro- 
found interest. The importance of it to government 
is so fundamental that we may say civilization rests 
upon it, or at least could not exist without it. . The 
amounts of money which are taken by the govern- 
ment from the people for governmental support are 
very large, so large that their magnitude would make 
the question of taxation sufficiently important to 
command a hearing from all thoughtful minds. The 
principles which underlie taxation are of the greatest 
moment, and too profound to be considered in a dis- 
cussion as brief as this. With the history of taxa- 
tion and with these principles I cannot deal on the 
present occasion, but in general I may say that taxes 
are a late development of civilization, and that, as we 
have them now, they have only come into vogue 
within comparatively recent centuries. 

Secondly, that in general they should be levied in 
an equitable manner, so that none of the people will 
be distressed, and so that all of the people will con- 
tribute in just proportion to the support of the gov- 
ernment. Thirdly, that the laying and regulation of 
taxes is intimately related to the liberties of the peo- 
ple. The method of taxation was practically the 
occasion of the American Revolution, and is so fun- 
damental in the history of English liberty that the 
Magna Charta was demanded and obtained from 
King John, by the barons, with the purpose not only 
of securing personal liberty but of relieving all prop- 
erty from unjust and capricious taxation. It is 



232 Taxation of Church Property. 

customary, at the present time, for the community 
to speak slightingly of those people who in our com- 
munities are studying most carefully the subject of 
taxation. I do not know of any class who are mak- 
ing this a special study to such a degree as those who 
are known by the name of " single tax men," and yet, 
whether they are right or wrong in their conclusions, 
they deserve the very greatest credit and sympathy 
for their investigations and researches. For one of 
our leading authorities on political economy has said 
that no man who has any regard for the liberties of 
the people will be indifferent to the matter of 
taxation. 

3. Having said thus much in a more general 
way, your attention is now called to the fact that our 
Lord, in the Gospel narrative which I read, at least 
gives evidence of his sanction to two or three simple 
principles. First, he was taxed as other people were 
taxed under the law. Second, he paid that tax and 
did not seek to evade it. Third, while he did not 
sanction the methods of the Roman government to 
which he paid the tax by paying it, nevertheless he 
seems to me to have clearly countenanced the princi- 
ple that civil government is deserving of the support 
of all men, and that the best of men are not too good 
to do their part towards sustaining the government 
of the country in which they live. Not attempting, 
therefore, to draw from the example of the Christ 
anything which is not in it, not assuming to give his 
sanction to any special form of taxation or civil 
government, I only wish the incident to pass for 
what it is worth, as indicating that he supported the 



Taxation of Church Property. 233 

civil government by paying his proportional part of 
its taxes. 

4. I propose to show on this occasion that the 
Koman Catholic Church should pay its part toward 
the support of the government. The alternatives as 
related to that church, as we learn from an historical 
survey, are these : either to permit oppression on her 
part, because she will certainly tax the people very 
heavily if permitted to do so ; or to regulate her prop- 
erty by confiscation, which nearly all these govern- 
ments of which I have spoken have been compelled 
to do in order to relieve themselves of her oppression ; 
or, as the third alternative, and it seems to me the 
only one left, taxation, by which we can prevent to 
some extent the oppression, and through which it is 
possible that confiscation may be avoided. In bring- 
ing these views into a clearer light, I call your atten- 
tion first to the certainty, — 

I. That the Roman Catholic Church in this coun- 
try is bent on the acquisition of unlimited wealth. 

1. I infer this from the fact that the Roman Catho- 
lic Church here, is the Roman Catholic Church of 
Europe and of the world. The church here is 
a foreign hierarchy, controlling American citizens. 
This church, its rulers claim, never changes, and there 
are no evidences whatever of its having changed in 
the purpose to acquire money. Having, therefore, 
stripped of their goods the populations of other lands, 
it is obvious to m.e that they are intending to do it 
here ; because, with their minds set on the acquisition 
of enormous wealth, they have never repudiated any 
of the methods which they have heretofore employed 



234 Taxation of Church Property, 

and are giving every evidence that they intend to 
apply them in this country as elsewhere. 

2. Moreover, the methods of the Roman Catholic 
Church, many of which I have revealed in this series 
of discourses, are her methods to-day. Everything 
that she has ever sold she sells now. Every method 
by which she has extracted money from the people 
she applies to them to-day. There is not one of all 
the operations by which Rome has taken money from 
the people but what she is now actively using in the 
United States of America, with the exception of the 
worst forms of inquisitorial proceeding. 

3. Moreover, she has succeeded to a very large 
degree already in obtaining the wealth which she 
seeks. Of this we have ocular demonstration. Wher- 
ever you look, on every hand, the Roman Catholic 
Church property is multiplying rapidly. A delegate, 
speaking in the Methodist Episcopal General Confer- 
ence in Omaha the other day, said he would like to 
call the attention of the Conference to the fact that 
where we get church lots the Roman Catholic Church 
gets blocks ; whole city blocks, he says, entire squares, 
— and by some means or other, not only gets but 
holds them against all comers. 

It is more than obvious to anybody who has trav- 
elled through this country, that in the west, even more 
than in the east, the Roman Catholic Church is gath- 
ering to herself very large properties. We have no 
means of knowing how much she does possess, for 
there are no returns made which would give us a 
basis for that knowledge. A great deal of the prop- 
erty which Rome is now getting, is coming directly 



Taxation of Church Property. 235 

or indirectly out of the public treasury. For may I 
not say that when we are supporting a very large 
number of her criminals and paupers in public institu- 
tions and from the public treasury, what we are pay- 
ing for their support is to no inconsiderable extent 
taken from us by the peculiar usages of the Roman 
Catholic Church, which has deprived these dependent 
ones of the means of self-help ? 

4. Not only are her possessions great, as we have 
evidence, but she has avowed her determination to 
gain large riches in this country. Of this, there is 
the most ample proof. In the Dominion of Canada, 
which is so near to us now politically and otherwise 
that nothing which occurs there is a matter of indif- 
ference to us, I find the following statement of Rome's 
attitude concerning "wealth." "The doctrine is" (that 
is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church now in 
vogue in Canada) ; " that the interference by the civil 
power in the administration of ecclesiastical property 
is a sacrilegious usurpation, a manifest and revolting 
absurdity besides being a folly as great as it would 
be for the same authority to undertake to make the 
course of the stars dependent on its will. The church 
alone," the modern doctrine runs, " has a right to 
legislate on the subject of tithes : the rules it makes 
are strictly obligatory, and the civil power has nothing 
to do with this or any similar matter. It is permitted 
to do one thing only, and not only permitted but com- 
manded, if it desires to exercise its legislative power 
with regard to ecclesiastical property ; and that is, to 
promulgate, as laws of the State, the laws of the 
church in a like matter ; to use every means at its 



236 Taxation of Church Property. 

disposal to put tliem into execution and cause them 
to be observvvd." 

" The Abbe Pelletier contends that the church's 
right of possession is one which the civil power can- 
not limit." 

In a Avord of explanation concerning the above state- 
ment, we merely remark that the Roman Catholic 
Church in theory demands that the civil government 
shall carry out all the church's laws with reference 
to the acquisition of property; and the law of the 
Roman Catholic Church as to the acquisition of prop- 
erty is, that she will take all she can get, without any 
interference whatever from anybody in the world. 

5. That I have not exaggerated their attitude and 
purpose, I read to you as concerning church prop- 
erty in our own country, from the pastoral letter 
of the second Plenary Council of Baltimore in 
1866, — the part which I read is a portion of the 
article concerning church property. The council 
says, " We have still to lament that in many of 
the States we are not as yet permitted legally to 
make those arrangements for the security of church 
property which are in accordance with the canons 
and discipline of the Catholic Church." What do 
they lack in our own State, for example ? What is 
desired by them in the State of Massachusetts? 
They have very large liberty of acquisition, fully 
as great as that enjoyed by any institution, corpora- 
tion, or individual in the State. 

They keep their people very largely poor. We 
support their criminals, paupers, beggars, insane, 
illiterate, saloon-keepers, etc. What more do they 



Taxation of Church Property. 237 

want ? More property, — that is what they want. 
(Applause.) " We are aware of the alleged grounds 
for this refusal to recognize the church in her cor- 
porate capacity, unless on the condition that in the 
matter of the tenure of ecclesiastical property she con- 
form to the general laws providing for this object." 
(They remonstrate that they are asked to conform to 
the general laws on the subject of the acquisition of 
property. Your church has had no occasion to re- 
monstrate. The church to which I belong has had 
no occasion to remonstrate. What is there in the 
laws in reference to the acquisition of property 
against which the Baltimore Plenary Council of the 
Roman Catholic Church remonstrates ?) They say, 
" These laws, however " (that is the laws of the 
States), "are for the most part based on principles 
which she cannot accept without departing from her 
practice from the beginning, as soon as she was per- 
mitted to enjoy liberty of worship. They are the 
expression of a distrust of ecclesiastical power, as 
such; and are the fruit of the misrepresentations 
which have been made of the action of the church 
in past ages. As well might the civil power pre- 
scribe to her the doctrines she is to teach, and the 
worship with which she is to honor God, as to im- 
pose on her a system of holding her temporalities 
which is alien to her principles, and which is bor- 
rowed from those who have rejected her authority." 
And furthermore they say, " In at least one of these 
United States (Missouri), laws have been passed 
by which all church property, not held by corpora- 
tions, is subjected to taxation ; and the avowed object 



238 Taxation of Church Property. 

of this discriminating legislation is hostility to the 
Catholic Church. In concluding these remarks, we 
merely refer to the attempt made in that State to 
make the exercise of the ecclesiastical ministry de- 
pend on a condition laid down by the civil power." 

That matter in the State of Missouri was simply 
this : After the war the State government, according 
to law, required the churches to give some evidence 
of loyalty, and the Roman Catholic Church resented 
it, as intimating that she had not exclusive control 
over her own property. 

After this Plenary Council had sent its action to 
the Pope at Rome, the Pope sent back an answer, 
which I read in part. It was directed to Archbishop 
Spaulding of Baltimore : — 

" He " (that is the Pope), " has directed me to ex- 
press directly to your amplitude, and through you to 
all your colleagues, his great pleasure, and to request 
you to thank them for the interest they have taken, 
and still take, in defending the Holy See^ and in vindi- 
cating its contested rights. Moreover, his holiness 
has learned with satisfaction that the papal loan is 
succeeding also through the co-operation of the Amer- 
ican episcopate." You notice the emphatic commen- 
dation is about church property, and the protest of 
the council in having civil law control their actions 
or estates. The Pope was also very much interested 
in the papal loan. The truth is, the action of the 
Baltimore Council, approved by the Pope, virtually 
declares that all laws by which church property is 
the subject of civil observation, inquiry, or control 
are contrary to the laws of the church of Rome ; in 



Taxation of Church Property, 239 

other words, they solemnly protest that they will 
have no law whatever in regard to their possession 
of church property except their own. This is a pre- 
cise statement of their attitude. That attitude can 
never be consistent with the principles of civil gov- 
ernment, — never. (Applause.) 

6. Thus they are paving the way for unlimited 
acquisition of church property; and as years ago 
they obtained a third of the property of the British 
Isles, and as to-day they hold a quarter of the prop- 
erty of the state of Ecuador, and a third of that of 
Chili, and as in 1857 they held more than a third 
of the property of Mexico, they now propose to get 
all the property of the United States which they can, 
and to hold it in defiance of the civil government. 
They themselves so declare, both in their acts and in 
their theory. 

One very careful student of the Roman Catholic 
Church in this country says that she now has two 
hundred and fifty million dollars' worth of property, 
but there are no means known to me of verifying 
such statement. The census of 1890 shows that 
their own estimate of the value of their churches 
is 1118,000,000 and over. This does not include 
schools, convents, monasteries, real estate, etc. 

7. Such acquisitions as they are making in this 
country have been in all lands where they have 
gained them, first of all by the impoverishment of 
the people. I need not go over that ground again. 
You know that where the Roman Catholic Church is 
rich, there the people are poor. Moreover, through 
its wealth it has invariably been a menace to the 



240 Taxation of Church Property, 

State. That I demonstrated on last Sunday when I 
showed you that so menacing have been its posses- 
sions, that the State has been compelled to take them 
in order to maintain the existence of civil govern- 
ment. What have been the experiences of other 
lands must become facts in this, especially as they 
enter politics to gain this property, — threatening, 
cajoling, and debauching laws, courts, and legisla- 
tors, in securing the possession of it, and claiming 
authority paramount to all other in holding, using, or 
disposing of it. 

II. Not to dwell longer on the certainty that what 
has transpired in other countries will come to pass 
here unless by some means we interfere, I submit that 
in view of these certainties they ought to be re- 
strained from gaining this property. How shall they 
be restrained ? 

1. First, by exposing all their methods and making 
intelligible to all the world their designs. The 
study of their history, to which we are giving atten- 
tion in these afternoon meetings, may be the pivotal 
point of the salvation of the United States of Amer- 
ica. (Applause.) The methods of this great power 
which is aggrandizing itself, need to be clearly laid 
open. When the public know what they are doing 
and designing, there will be raised a storm of indig- 
nation. All over this country there has been an up- 
rising against the methods of AVall Street, and a 
protest from the Farmers' Alliance and from multi- 
tudes of thoughtful people against the wrecking of 
railroads and the speculation in stocks which is a 
result. Such agitation is entirely legitimate. The 



Taxation of Church Property, 241 

understanding of the methods of many of these spec- 
ulators condemns their practices. But, sirs, Wall 
Street is a cooing dove compared with the rapacious 
vulture of the Roman Catholic Church. (Loud ap- 
plause.) And what I propose is that the veil be 
torn from their methods, and that everybody freely 
look in on this great system which has wrecked Aot 
railroads but nations ; which has struck its blow not 
at private treasuries only, but which has impoverished 
the treasuries of governments and of generations of 
mankind. 

2. I would, therefore, in addition to exposing their 
methods, value justly and fairly all their possessions. 
I would throw open to the light all their religious 
houses. I would look into all their treasuries, and I 
would estimate at a fair valuation every dollar of 
their real estate. One reason for so doing is that 
under the guise of being Roman ecclesiastics, many 
of their priests acquire enormous amounts of personal 
property for which they are not taxed. A friend of 
mine in a Western city told me only a little while 
ago, that he discovered (he is a minister, doing 
kindred work to that of Dr. Parkhurst in New York) 
that the Roman Catholic bishop resident in that city 
owned as his own private property one block of build- 
ings in that city worth a hundred thousand dollars, 
for which he did not pay one dollar of tax ; and the 
minister called together some of the leading gentle- 
men of the city and of his own church, who resolved 
that either the country should know it or the bishop 
should value his property and pay the tax, which 
they proceeded to have done. I want you to tell me 



242 Taxation of Church Property. 

how it is that poor ignorant boys, passed by charity 
through the theological seminaries of the Roman 
Catholic Church, without ever doing a stroke of 
work except taking the money of the people, die 
possessed of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which 
they give to the church or by will to other ecclesias- 
tics. And much of their property, so far as I can 
learn, is never declared to the assessors, and is not 
taxed. 

3. I would compel them to support the State, for 
the sake of establishing the principle that the Roman 
Catholic Church is not supreme in this country ; that 
instead of the nation paying tribute to the church, 
the church shall pay tribute to the nation (loud ap- 
plause) ; and if one or the other of them is to be 
poor, the one that is rich shall be the beneficent gov- 
ernment of the United States. (Applause.) At 
present, the church saps and does not support the 
nation. I would tax them, in order that she may 
support it. But proceeding still farther, and giving 
still additional reasons why Rome should be taxed, 
I observe that while this taxation will accomplish 
the above ends in part, it will accomplish a great 
deal more. 

4. If we tax the Roman Catholic Church, by so 
doing we can discover whether or not they are loyal 
to this country. They profess loyalty. They pro- 
fess too much to be really, confidently relied upon ; 
their professions of loyalty are loud, their claims in 
regard to this country are very large. What they 
have done to make good those professions has not 
yet been great. You will see in their papers every 



Taxation of Church Property. 243 

little while that the Revolution was fought very 
largely by Irish Roman Catholics ; but the truth is, 
the Irishmen of the Revolution who fought for the 
nation were almost all Protestants, contrary to the 
Romanist claim. You will see them affirming that 
in the Civil War the battles of the country were 
mainly fought by Roman Catholics, and by Roman 
Catholics from Ireland ; but the truth is, when you 
examine the figures from the War Department, there 
were comparatively few of them in the army, and 
more of them deserted in proportion than of any other 
nationalities in the army. (Applause.) The records 
of the War Department show that of the Irish popu- 
lation only nine (9) per cent enlisted in the Union 
Army, and that among these seventy-two (72) per 
cent deserted: more than ten times the proportion of 
British, and fourteen times the number of native de - 
serters. And this I say, not to reflect on the Irish 
race. I love the Irish people, but Rome has de- 
bauched them, and those of them that are under 
Rome are not the best representatives of their noble 
race. In proportion as they are emancipated, in that 
proportion they show the glory of their character, 
the vigor of their understanding, and their value as 
citizens. But the facts about their fighting our bat- 
tles are impudent misstatements, as are most Roman- 
ist claims and if they insist on lying about it, they 
will compel us to tell the truth. (Applause.) 

5. I would tax the Roman Catholic Church, again, 
because she is getting more advantages in this 
country to-day than in any other country of the 
world. So they themselves admit. A recent pope 



244 Taxation of Church Property. 

of Rome has said that there was no countiy in which 
he was so much a pope as in America; and they all 
allow that America is giving them very great advan- 
tages. So did Spain. How did they repay her ? By 
tearing out her vitals. So did Italy. How did they 
compensate her for their privileges? By holding 
her in chains for a thousand years. France also 
extended facilities to the Roman Catholic Church. 
How did they reward her ? By making religion a 
travesty of truth, and turning France to infidelity. 
At present they are having very great advantages in 
this country. Very well. In order that Ave may 
not repeat upon us the history of other prostrate peo- 
ples, let her pay for what she gets, as far as possible. 
(Applause.) 

6. Moreover, it seems to me reasonable that this 
should be demanded because the advantages of the 
Roman Catholic Church in the United States are not 
advantages to the nation. I have spoken of this so 
fully that I need only to state it. Also, because his- 
tory shows that we must have either taxation or con- 
fiscation in this matter of ecclesiastical usurpation. 
I would adopt the gentlest means first. If we have 
taxation, I think we may avoid confiscation. If we 
do not have taxation, I believe confiscation is inevita- 
ble; for this nation, like all nations, will come to a 
death grapple with her internal foes, and as she has 
done once, so will she do again : when the United 
States grapples with her foemen, those foemen are 
doomed to overthrow. (Applause.) 

7. One other reason for taxation which I would 
give, is that a very considerable amount of the prop- 



Taxation of Church Property. 245 

erty of the Romish Church is business property, used 
for purposes of direct revenue. I here cite to you a 
proof of this statement in Canada, which interested 
me very greatly. Please to notice the connection 
in which it occurs. " In the session of the Quebec 
Legislature, 1876 and 1877, the Sisters of Providence 
obtained the passage of an Act by a large majority — 
the vote was forty against thirteen, — giving them 
authority to carry on every kind of manufactures in 
the convent." Why should a factory carried on by 
a corporation pay a tax for its property and its pro- 
duct, and a factory carried on under the name of a 
convent or a monastery go free of taxation, both as 
to its property and its product? Let any working 
man answer me that. If they make revenue by the 
manufacture of goods, where they make that revenue 
there they should be taxed on manufactures and on 
manufacturing property. Moreover, for revenue in 
this country they do worse than that. " In King's 
County (New York) during the five years from 1871 
to 1876, the cost to the people of the county from 
the pauperizing of children, seven hundred and 
twenty of whom were found to have both parents liv- 
ing, was reported as having risen from $40,000 to 
$172,000, at a price for each child so large that Com- 
missioner Ropes said that the over-crowded asylums 
farmed out those whom they had no room for. The 
proportion in different asylums, as reported, was : 
Roman Catholic 1,298 ; all Protestant denomina- 
tions, 266 ; Jewish, 17." Thus obtaining from the 
State, payments for the support of orphans, they 
crowd these houses with children both of whose 



246 Taxation of Church Property, 

parents are living, and gain from the government a 
disproportionate sum for their support, the Roman 
Catholics having more than five to one of the pro- 
portion ; and they make these institutions a source 
of revenue, pouring the money into the hands of the 
priests. Such orphan asylums as that should be 
taxed. (Applause.) 

III. But some one will say, if the Roman Catholic 
Church is taxed, all the churches should be. Propos- 
ing to deal with this question in the most absolute 
spirit of fairness, I am ready to consider this claim. 
Is this the alternative? 

1. If the Romish Church is taxed, ought all the 
other churches to be ? 

First, I will say there are peculiarities of the Ro- 
man Catholic Church whicli suggest that it might 
justly be taxed when other churches were not. Some 
of these already have been disclosed, but I will men- 
tion two or three such peculiarities, in addition to 
those which I have already named. 

1. Tlie Roman Catholic Church, unlike any other 
church in this country, is an alien church, whose 
official authority, supervision, and direction, policy 
and purposes come from Italy. It is not an Ameri- 
ican church. It is not an Italian cliurch. It is a 
mediaeval church, with its headquarters in Rome. 
Its officers are appointed by the prince to whom they 
swear allegiance, not elected by the people of this 
country. Further than this, all its property is 
owned by these same ecclesiastics, who owe their 
allegiance to a foreign power. Still further, all its 
surplus revenues go to that official head outside of 



Taxation of Ohurch Property. '24cJ 

the country, who has never been a friend to the 
government of the United States. Claiming inde- 
pendence, as it does, of the civil power, having its 
officials only loyal to a foreign power, pouring its 
revenues into the treasury of a foreign power ; in 
these respects it is entirely unlike any other church, 
and it seems to me can justly be considered a subject 
for special legislation on the ground of its manifest 
unlikeness to all other communions. 

2. Moreover, a second reason why the Roman 
Catholic Church, being unlike all other churches, 
might justly be taxed, is this, that there is no other 
church which has made so many paupers and so 
many criminals to be supported by the government 
of this nation and of the several States as the Roman 
Catholic Church. Go where you will, to prison, 
penitentiary, insane asylum, orphanage, hospital, you 
find a very large disproportion of the money which 
the country is spending for the indigent and criminal 
classes is spent for people first who have been made 
poor by the Roman Catholic Church in other coun- 
tries or in this country, and second, for people who 
are now kept poor in its communion. Therefore, I 
say, because they cost so infinitely more than any 
other church, there is a reason why special legisla- 
tion should exact of them something for the support 
of their own dependent and criminal people. (Ap- 
plause.) 

3. Moreover, I add to this another reason, based on 
their manner of holding property. They are unlike 
any other church in this, that their property is not 
held by corporations and trustees of the people who 



248 Taxation of Church Property. 

gave money for the purchase of the real estate or for 
the erection of their edifices. Their property is not 
the property of the people, as is the property of 
the Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist, Congregation- 
alist, and all the other Protestant churches. The 
property of these churches, given by the people, is 
owned by the people. They can repair it, or mort- 
gage it, or sell it under the law. But the property of 
the Roman Catholic Church is held by the bishops in 
trust for the Pope. It is personal property, not the 
property of trustees or of the people. And when I 
find that these owners use it for their aggrandize- 
ment, at the expense of the people ; when I find that 
they dispose of it personally by will, that they can 
sell it or not sell it as they like, — then I say that in 
this respect, being totally unlike any other church, 
they might properly be the subject of special legisla- 
tion, even if other churches were not. 

4. And again we may say the Roman Catholic 
Church, unlike any other church, transacts a very 
large Avholesale and retail business in certain articles, 
for money, and as a business it ought to be taxed 
(applause) as other churches ought not to be. By 
the way, I have the latest news from Ste. Anne this 
morning. Twt) hundred thousand people bowed 
down to the relic of flesh and bone in New York, 
and instead of sixteen thousand dollars, the figure 
last reported which they paid to see it is twenty 
thousand dollars, the lowest figure that is now named 
as the tribute of superstition to knavery. I say that 
any institution which does a show business like this, 
where there is no expense and all profit, ought to pay 
a tax on receipts. (Loud applause.) 



Taxation of Ohurch Property. 249 

IV. Nevertheless, after showing these marked pecul- 
iarities which would justify the taxation of Roman- 
ism, I am now coming to the point where your 
interest, hitherto general, will be personal. If it 
is necessary in order to be just, if it is necessary in 
order to be honorable, if it is necessary in order to 
be equitable, that the power of Roman Catholic 
rapacity shall be restrained by taxation only when 
the acquisition of all other churches and their prop- 
erty is subject to taxation, then I say let all church 
property everywhere be taxed. (Loud applause.) 
I accept the alternative. All the churches are re- 
ceiving unparalleled benefits under the Constitution 
and the laws of this free republic, and for my part I 
should be glad as a church member to do my part, 
out of the religious treasuries for the maintenance 
of a country which I love next to the church of 
Jesus Christ. (Loud applause.) 

1. Other denominations than the Roman Catholic 
are also in danger of amassing undue wealth, though 
the danger is not so imminent. It is a patent fact, 
which they might well retort upon us, that Trinity 
Church in New York City is probably the richest 
religious corporation in America, if not in the world ; 
while the collegiate churches of the Reformed Church 
in New York are likewise possessed of very large 
revenues. There is danger, my friends, lest covet- 
ousness should come in upon Protestant communions, 
and I should be willing to do all in my power, not 
merely theoretically but practically, to prevent us 
from falling into the same snare which has been the 
curse of the Roman Church. 



250 Taxation of Church Property, 

2. Worship should not be a matter of State support. 
I judge that there are none of us here who are pre- 
pared to say that we believe the State ought to support 
the church or the churches. There are lands in which 
this is still done, but it is not according to the genius 
of our people, and is contrary to our Constitution. 
If the government is not to subsidize the church, 
if the State shall not support with its revenues an 
ecclesiastical institution, then we might well inquire 
whether the government should remit the just taxes 
on church property as a part of church support, and 
so, indirectly, pay great sums out of the pockets of all 
the people to please a part of them. There are many 
people prejudiced against the churches to-day because 
they think that they should be taxed, and so pay a 
portion of the expenses of government. All just 
cause for such prejudice should be removed. 

I would like you to notice that the principle which 
I here announce, that the support of the church ought 
to be entirely apart from the treasury of the State, has 
been vindicated by the Baptists and Methodists very 
I'ecently. For they have practically said, " Although 
we need money for the education of the Indians, we 
will not take one dollar out of the treasury of the 
United States, as a matter of principle ; and in so 
resolving, they have virtually declared that they see 
very great danger in any union of church and State 
by which State funds support the church; and if this 
danger is so imminent that they will not take money 
out of the treasury for the support of their schools, 
why should they take it out of the treasury of the 
nation for the support of their churches, through 
exemption from taxatioii ? 



Taxation of Church Property, 251 

3. The amount of church property in this country 
in Protestant hands is now counted by hundreds of 
millions. There are multitudes of poor property 
holders who would be relieved in the matter of taxa- 
tion if the church property, assessed at a fair valua- 
tion, should be taxed. You can see this very plainly. 
Here is a rich congregation which builds a church 
worth half a million dollars, and can well afford to do 
so ; here is a poor congregation in the same city whose 
church cost ten thousand dollars, — and they are 
numerically as great as the other. If that five hun- 
dred thousand dollars, and that ten thousand dollars 
were added to the assessed valuation of the real 
estate of the municipality, the rich people who are 
now occupying the splendid church would simply pay 
their proportion of taxation for their privileges, while 
the poor people would be relieved in just that propor- 
tion. When the valuation of property is increased, 
then the rate of taxation on a dollar is diminished. 
Therefore, the large increase of valuation through a 
property of half a million being added to the muni- 
cipal wealth in its assessment, relieves the purse of 
every poor man in that municipality by diminishing 
the rate of taxation. 

4. If the church would freely consent to have its 
property valued and taxed, I have no doubt that it 
would very much raise the moral tone of society by 
so doing. Studying recently a book on taxation, a 
very carefully written treatise, I found this astounding 
statement repeated over and over again, — that it is 
a common thing for men otherwise reputable, to make 
false oatJis with reference to their property, so as to 



252 Taxation of Church Property. 

avoid taxation ; that in every State in the Union most 
serious trouble results from the fact that men try to 
cover up their property instead of paying on it what 
is justly due. Of course this is dishonest and im- 
moral. Let me bring forward a kindred case, and 
show you where the church could exalt truth and 
honesty. Here is a city lot or block, worth a great 
deal of money and constantly increasing in value. 
It is owned by a church. On a little corner of the 
lot the owners build a very small chapel. That 
makes it technically church property for church uses, 
so they maintain and hold all that valuable land 
without paying any tax to the government. The 
man of dull moral sense, who is a member of that 
church, cannot see any reason why if the church does 
so, he should not do something equivalent. In my 
humble opinion, if all the churches in this country 
would come forward in a manly way, declare all their 
property, and ask to have it fairly taxed, they would 
do more to bring up the moral standard of men who 
make false oaths in reference to property, than by 
almost any amount of preaching honesty. (Applause.) 

A very large percentage of personal property now 
escapes taxation altogether, which is to the disadvan- 
tage of all. 

I think I could show, if I had time, that consenting 
to taxation, on the part of the churches, would not 
increase the expenditure of their members for gov- 
ernment, and would, on the other hand, equalize 
taxation throughout all the municipality or the State, 
and lessen the tax-rate. 

In 1875, in a message to Congress, President Grant 
made this remarkable statement: — 



Taxation of Church Property. 253 

" In 1850, 1 believe, the churcli property of the 
United States which paid no tax, municipal or State, 
amounted to 187,000,000. In 1860 the amount had 
doubled. In 1870, it was $354,483,587. In 1900, 
without a check, it is safe to say, this property will 
reach a sum exceeding $3,000,000,000. So vast a 
sum, receiving all the protection and benefits, of 
government, without bearing its proportion of the 
burdens and expenses of the same, will not be looked 
upon acquiescently by those who have to pay the 
taxes. In a growing country, where real estate en- 
hances so rapidly with time as in the United States, 
there is scarcely a limit to the wealth that may be 
acquired by corporations, religious or otherwise, if 
allowed to retain real estate without taxation. The 
contemplation of so vast a property as here alluded 
to, without taxation, may lead to sequestration with- 
out constitutional authority, and through bloodshed. 
I would suggest the taxation of all property equally." 

V. Having thus announced the positive reasons 
for taxation of church property, I wish to meet 
fairly those who will bring forward objections to tax- 
ing the property of the church. Tliose objections I 
very much respect, for it is a matter of which we 
have thought very little. We are driven to this 
emergency, perhaps, as a war measure. We were not 
ready to emancipate the slave, until the only hope 
of this nation lay in his freedom. When General 
Fremont was ready to declare the slaves in Missouri 
free early in the war, the country said, " Not ready," 
and even the great emancipator Lincoln said, 
"Not ready," but there came a time when in the hot 



254 Taxation of Church Property, 

fires of war the shackles of the slave melted. It may- 
be we have not thought it to be immediately desir- 
able that the property of churches should be taxed ; 
but we have come to a time of emergency. The 
peril of other nations is over-shadowing our own 
land, decided and wise measures need to be taken ; 
and to lead to united action these objections need 
to be calmly and thoughtfully considered. When I 
have stated a few of them, and answered them, I have 
done. 

1. Some of you will say, our churches are for the 
public good, and, because for the public good, there- 
fore they should not be taxed. In the city of New 
York during the war, was formed the strong patriotic 
organization known as the Union League. Noble 
men joined themselves together to give the country 
an evidence of their devotion and loyalty, and to 
stand behind the government in its herculean work. 
They built a most magnificent building on Fifth 
Avenue. That building is the headquarters of the 
Union League Club to-day. The building and the 
club are a public benefit, and yet, although they have 
done so much for the nation's welfare, I do not sup- 
pose they ever thought of asking exemption from 
taxation on the ground that they were a public bene- 
fit. But, says one, the churches are so much a public 
benefaction that what they do ought to be considered 
an equivalent for what they receive in the w^ay of pro- 
tection. I answer, this hall is a public benefaction, 
and I do not know (I speak with great carefulness), 
that any church edifice in the city of Worcester has 
done more for the intellectual and moral elevation of 



Taxation of Church Property. 255 

the city than this magnificent hall. It is a public 
benefit, an honor to the men who projected it long 
ago, and who open it so freely to the public use. 
But I do not think any member of its corporation 
ever thought of asking that the property of the 
Mechanics' Association should be exempt from taxa- 
tion, because it is a public benefit, and is used for 
public advantage. Why, then, should we ask exemp- 
tion for church edifices? 

2. But another says, churches are freely thrown 
open to all ; they are public property, and therefore 
they should not be taxed. I answer, they are cer- 
tainly owned by somebody else than the public. 
They are owned by their congregations, and held by 
the officers of those congregations. They are not 
public property, therefore, in the technical and exact 
sense. And, moreover, if you say that they are thrown 
open to everybody, that all the people can go to them 
freely, I say with shame and confusion of face, would 
God that they were, but as a matter of fact, Ave know 
that the churches are very largely so exclusive that 
everybody knows who is wanted there, and who is 
not. (Applause.) Would I be a better Christian if 
I should evade the truth in the presence of this 
congregation, and deny the fact that many of our 
churches are social clubs, pure and simple, with a 
religious bias ? (Applause.) They do not want the 
poor, they do not want the ragged, they do not want 
the dirty, they do not want the lowly, they do not 
welcome the people whose social standing is doubt- 
ful ; and when such people come, they are treated as 
Jesus Christ himself in peasant garb would be 



256 Taxation of Church Property. 

treated, if it were He, and they did not know who 
He was. He and they would be thrust together into 
the lowliest place. Why, sirs, one of the most mon- 
strous things in the history of religion is that the 
churches are not open to the public in such a sense 
that many people who respect themselves do not go 
to them, because they cannot go and respect them- 
selves ; and I could pour out bitter tears here because 
it is true. The churches maintain the caste spirit. 
You can rate the property value of men by their 
seats in the church, — these in the broad aisle,^ those 
in the back seats, and others in the galleries. The 
uncovering of the shame of the church is most pain- 
ful to me, but truth demands that we say that the 
churches are not the property of the public to such 
an extent that it should be a reason why they be 
exempted from taxation. (Applause.) Indirectly, 
they are for the benefit of all ; no doubt that is true. 
So is a factory indirectly for the benefit of all ; so is 
a private school indirectly for the benefit of all ; so 
is every man's property which is well kept and 
honestly earned, indirectly for the benefit of all, but 
can that be alleged as a reason why the factory, the 
private school, and the private house and grounds be 
exempt from taxation ? 

3. It is further objected that these church members 
have been already taxed in their private capacity, 
and that, therefore, they should not pay a further 
tax in this benevolent work of the church. If they 
have paid their taxes in their private capacity as 
individual holders, why should they not now pay 
their taxes in their corporate capacity as joint-hold- 



Taxation of Church Property, 257 

ers of property ? By this method, as I have already 
said, poor people would be very much relieved ; 
indeed, rich people would pay less on their property 
than now they pay, if taxes were levied on all 
property alike. 

4. But another says, being religious they ought 
not to be taxed. You have an idea that there is a 
kind of sacrilege in taxing churches, because they 
are religious. Perhaps you are religious : is that any 
reason why you should not be taxed ? Perhaps you 
do your business and hold your property conscien- 
tiously as a Christian. Have you ever pleaded exemp- 
tion on that ground ? Well, but, says one, these are 
religious in the large sense, they are religious insti- 
tutions. So is Mormonism, and yet the other day 
the United States took a very large portion of the 
property of that very religious Morman Church, 
amounting to a million dollars or more, and applied 
it for the education of the Mormon youth under the 
direction of the government. The government prac- 
tically confiscated the property of this religious or- 
ganization, and by so heavy a tax they made it serve 
the cause of education. I appeal to history that the 
Mormon Church is not such a blot on the history of 
time as is the Roman Catholic Church. Do you say 
that the Mormons have murdered men, and point to 
the Mountain Meadow massacre ? I hear the gurgle 
of rivers of blood shed by Rome. Do you say that 
the Mormons have countenanced vice by their sys- 
tem of polygamy ? Read the histories of centuries, 
to tell you how celibate priests, monks, and nuns 
have violated all morality. Do you say that the 



258 Taxation of Church Property, 

Mormons have oppressed the people by exacting 
tithes ? Turn to South America, and see how Rome, 
by her exactions, has enslaved the intellect, plun- 
dered the treasury, and depraved the principles of 
the nations. No, the fact that any church is reli- 
gious is not a reason why it should not be taxed. 
The reason must be some other than this, and the 
sufficient reason I think does not exist. 

5. If churches are taxed, says one, thinking the 
matter over broadly, then educational endowments 
would have to be taxed. All our colleges having large 
accumulations of funds which are used for the sup- 
port of education would necessarily pay taxes on their 
property. If we are going to tax church property we 
would have to tax educational property. I answer, 
educational endowments are taxed already in many 
cases. For example, Johns Hopkins University is 
supported largely by Baltimore and Ohio Railroad 
stock. That stock is taxed ; nor do I see any reason 
in the world why educational institutions should not 
be taxed, saving those which belong to everybody, are 
supported by everybody, and are freely open to every- 
bod}^, as are the public schools. 

6. But, one replies, if you tax educational institu- 
tions you will have to tax charitable institutions, pri- 
vate hospitals, orphanages, and the like ; and they 
think they find in this an insuperable objection to 
taxation such as I propose. My friends, is it any 
more oppressive to tax a private hospital than it is to 
tax a private physician on his own personal property ? 
Suppose many physicians combine. Their work is 
not wholly philanthropic. They receive a revenue 



Taxation of Church Property. 259 

from the institution and should pay tax. But, one 
says, here is an orphanage (and I have told you how 
Rome abuses orphanages and makes them minister to 
her gains), and, say they, we shall have to tax all 
orphanages if we tax Roman Catholic orphanages. I 
reply, yes; well may we do so, and why not? Yonder 
on a humble street is a poor widow left with four 
orphans under her care. Her little house is worth a 
thousand or fifteen hundred dollars. That is an 
orphanage which if any are to be exempt from taxa- 
tion ought to be. (Applause.) Has anybody ever 
pleaded that the small property of poor widows and 
orphans may be exempt from taxation ? If not, then 
why should not the property where a hundred orphans 
are cared for by people whose aggregate property 
amounts to millions, do something for the nation 
which will care for those orphans from now until the 
time when they enjoy the larger privileges of mature 
citizenship ; befriending them through the whole 
course of their lives ? (Applause.) 

I have touched upon every objection which I have 
time to note this afternoon, and I think I have made 
clear that for the sake of so great a principle, and of 
so important a result, all the churches might well and 
profitably submit to taxation, ay, and welcome it 
gladly, unless they propose also, which I do not be- 
lieve, to become the oppressors of the people, when it 
is their duty to give them liberty and salvation. 
What should be exempt from taxation ? The things 
which are the common property of all, as I have just 
said, and which the public all freely and equally use. 

With all that has been and might be advanced to 



260 Taxation of Cliurcli Property. 

justify such a conclusion, I believe that the churches 
would be ready to bear their part in the support of 
the government. Rome alone would resist to the last. 
Of Canada, Lindsay says ("Rome in Canada," p. 365), 
that the laity are feeling the burden of the immunity 
from taxation which the church enjoys, and have 
raised the question of taxing it. " Already the epis- 
copate is on the alert, and has made a sign which shows 
that it intends to resist the change with all the power 
it can command. In a circular issued in November, 
1875, the seven bishops on the strength of their united 
authority, instruct the priests that if the municipali- 
ties or other civil authorities speak of taxing the 
property of the church and of the religious commu- 
nities, the priest is to communicate the fact to the 
bishop, under pain of excommunication." No blow 
strikes to the vitals of Rome like enlightening her 
people and diminishing her revenues. Rome Avould 
resist taxation with excommunication. Rome alone 
would protest that taxation could never be permitted 
without a sacrifice of her laws and rights. Rome 
alone would resolve that it should not be, since her 
taxation would be her death. So be it. (Applause.) 
If it be death to any church, Roman or otherwise, to 
help support this government by fair taxation, then let 
it die. (Applause.) But, as I believe, by standing 
squarely for the principle, we can protect the nation, 
upbuild religion, emancipate the people, and check- 
mate the rapacity of the priests. (Applause.) 



NO. XI. CHURCH AND STATE: THEIR 
TRUE RELATIONS. 



" Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how 
they might entangle him in his talk. 

And they sent out unto him their disciples with the 
Herodians, saying. Master, we know that thou art 
true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither 
carest thou for any man : for thou regardest not the 
person of men. 

Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou ? Is it law- 
ful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not ? 

But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, 
Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? 

Show me the tribute money And they brought unto 
him a penny. 

And he saith unto them. Whose is this image and 
superscription ? 

They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto 
them. Render therefore unto Caesar the things which 
are Caesar's : and unto God the things that are God's. 

When they had heard these words they marvelled, 
and left him, and went their way." 

In speaking to-day upon the subject of Church and 
State in their mutual relations, I take for mv text the 

261 



262 Church and State: their True Relatio7is. 

words at which the Pharisees marvelled, when they 
had undertaken to entangle the Lord Jesus Christ 
in his talk : " Render therefore unto Caesar the things 
which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are 
God's." 

1. By the progress of our thought, which I believe 
has been so connected that what has followed has 
come in orderly sequence from the premises going 
before, we on last Sunday urged that the only possible 
way by which the government of the United States 
could check the rapacity of the priests and protect 
the interests of the people was to lay a tax on the 
property not only of the Roman Catholic Church, but 
in order that equity might prevail and objection 
might not justly be offered to so doing, that it should, 
in the exercise of its administrative functions, lay a 
tax on the property of all the churches. The suprem- 
acy of the government in matters of property must 
of course be assumed from its right to levy such tax, 
and the relation of the church and the state can in 
part be inferred from such an act on the part of the 
government. 

2. That this relationship is a matter of serious con- 
cern you may infer from the fact that the recent na- 
tional Republican Convention at Minneapolis inserted 
in its platform a plank in which it expressed with 
emphasis its belief that the church and state ought 
to be kept separate. This does not mean, as I under- 
stand them, that the church should be excluded by 
or from the state, or that the church should attempt 
to exist independently of the state, but that church 
and state should so coexist and harmonize that 



Church and State: their True Relations. 263 

neither should trench upon the rights of the other, 
and that both should conserve the very highest 
temporal interests of the people. Plainly that con- 
vention would have made no such deliverance if there 
had been no occasion for it. Still more obviously is 
it evident that unless they had believed that there 
was danger of the church and the state coming into 
relations which would militate against the welfare of 
the people, they would have made no pronouncement 
concerning them. A deep-seated fear exists in the 
minds of the people of this country, born of their in- 
telligence and their knowledge of human history, lest 
the civil liberties which we enjoy, and which are as 
priceless as they are excellent, may somehow be 
filched from us ; and an equal fear exists on the part 
of our people who know how through many centuries 
the nations have struggled against religious tyrants, 
lest somehow that rare and marvellous religious free- 
dom which we enjoy in this country should likewise 
be lost us. There never has been an hour in the his- 
tory of the American state or in the history of Chris- 
tianity in the United States, when the people would 
not rally, if they really began to fear that civil or 
religious liberty were in any wise imperilled: for 
I believe as a principle more settled than the rocks 
of our hills, more firmly ingrained than the phrase- 
ology of our Constitution, there has been born into the 
American people a purpose to be free. (Applause.) 
That purpose takes form as the exigencies of the time 
suggest, but you can wrench from us anything sooner 
than our consent to be tyrannized over, whether in 
the state or in the church. 



264 Church and State : their True Relations. 

Our fear is based on the history of nations. We 
know somewhat of the sufferings of humanity and 
the struggles of government in other lands. We 
know that where the church has been tyrannous it 
has been degraded, and the same is true of the state. 
We have a conviction that the separation of their or- 
ganized governments and heads is for the general 
good. We never want the time to come in this coun- 
try when a priest shall be President, or when a Presi- 
dent shall be priest. 

3. Our Lord, in the words which I have taken, 
said more than I could explain in an hour's speaking. 
He did not contrast the civil government with the 
ecclesiastical government. He did not say, " Render 
to the head of the civil state what belongs to the 
head of the civil state, and to the head of the ecclesi- 
astical hierarchy what belongs to the head of the 
ecclesiastical hierarchy," but he said, in the support 
of civil government, " Render to the ruler, as 
embodying the government, what is his due, but 
have personal relations with God in matters of reli- 
gion, and directly to him, not through a Csesar or a 
pope, — render to God the things that are God's." 
(Applause.) 

The civil state is undoubtedly included in the 
divine administration. The duty of reverencing 
rulers is laid down as a part of human duty ; but 
I do not find Christ anywhere teaching that there is 
any ecclesiastical order which has such relation to 
us as has the civil order, but that, on the contrary, 
we are to perform our duties to God direct and our 
duties to man partly through contact and association 
and partly through the civil state. 



Cliurch and State: their True Relations. 265 

I. The relations of church and state have been a 
matter of profound interest among men for centuries. 
1. Three views have prevailed. The first, of the 
supremacy of the church, its absolute authority over 
the civil government. The second view is the su- 
premacy of the state, its absolute precedence over 
the ecclesiastical order. The third view is that of 
the reciprocal independence of both, which involves 
the absolute authority of neither the one nor the other. 
All three methods have been tried, and tried through 
extended years. The doctrine of the supremacy ot 
the church is the doctrine wherever the Romap 
Catholic Church has had or now has power. The 
doctrine of the supremacy of the state was adopted 
by the Reformers and the churches of the Reforma- 
tion as a reaction and protest against the cause of 
the sufferings which they had endured at the hands 
of a supreme hierarchy. The doctrine of the recip- 
rocal independence of church and state has not, so 
far as I know, ever had a field for complete exercise 
except in the United States. I find that writers who 
discourse upon this great theme suggest the United 
States of America as the country where the recipro- 
cal independence of the church and state is having 
its most noted illustration. You will notice in 
your reading of modern European history the word 
Concordat now and then, and undoubtedly many of 
you know that a Concordat is a sort of treaty of 
peace between the Roman Catholic Church and the 
civil government, by which they undertake so far as 
they can, through mutual concession, to live in con- 
cord. There is a Concordat between the French 



266 Church and State : their True Rdations, 

government and the church made by the first Napo- 
leon, broken and afterward restored ; between the 
Austrian government and the Roman Catholic 
Church made by Franz Joseph ; and these Concordats 
are only an indication of the endeavor of civil gov- 
ernment to get along peaceably with that church 
which claims supreme authority. Slowly but surely 
the supremacy of the Roman Catholic hierarchy is 
departing from it. 

2. I cannot on this occasion undertake a philosophi- 
cal discussion of the relations of church and state in 
all their profoundest significance. It would be of 
very great interest. In order to do it I should need 
a volume instead of a sermon. It would be neces- 
sary carefully to define what is meant by the church ; 
the essence, the organization, the government, the 
rights and the duties of the church. It would be 
equally necessary correctly to define the state ; what 
we mean by it, geographically, governmentally, con- 
stitutionally, and in all ways. Detailed considera- 
tions of the function of the one over against the 
other among the same people might well call for the 
most varied historical information and proof. Upon 
this profound general question I cannot enter. I 
will narrow the scope and perhaps intensify the 
interest by considering the actual relations of the 
church and the state in this nation, not considered 
abstractly but practically. 

II. The churches of the United States are cer- 
tainly related to the state. 1. The religious census 
of the United States, just taken, shows us that there 
axe about one hundred and forty different denomina- 



Church and State : their Ti'ue Relations. 267 

tions and religious organizations in the country, 
which have their own peculiarities. Of this one 
hundred and forty separate bodies, I suppose, count- 
ing out the communistic societies, it may be said that 
somewhat more than a hundred are religious denom- 
inations of one sort and another. Of these bodies of 
religious people, united together by religious ties, 
and administering to the spiritual instruction of the 
country and of the world, we may say that most of 
them are in no conflict whatever with the civil gov- 
ernment, either of the nation at large or of the 
States in which they live. Neither their creeds nor 
their sense of duty bring them into any conflict with 
the laws which as citizens they have assisted to make 
and which as citizens they help to support. In mat- 
ters of church control, of discipline, of morals, of 
education, of holding property, of civil duty, of civil 
allegiance, in fact, in all details of life, they are prac- 
tically at one with the state. As to the principles 
which these churches announce, they are not gener- 
ally found challenging the Constitution or the laws. 
They are not, as bodies, seeking to control politics. 
It would be very difficult to say on which side politi- 
cally are the majorities of the various religious de- 
nominations, taking the whole country at large. 
They are interested in all public questions, but they 
are never found dictating a political party j^licy. 
They utter themselves, for instance, concerning the 
treaties of the United States as excluding the Chi- 
nese. They speak their mind on the liquor traffic. 
They declare their convictions on all questions of 
the public welfare, but you do not find that they 



268 Church and State : their True Relations. 

formulate a political policy or that they attempt 
as bodies the control of the national legislation. 
These churches, of a hundred denominations, so 
varied in many of the minor principles of their 
church life, and some of them quite at variance in a 
portion of the larger matters of church administra- 
tion, are almost all found to harmonize with the gov- 
ernment in that they regard the public welfare as a 
matter of great and common interest. They en- 
deavor to increase the security and safety of all 
people in the state. They hold in high esteem the 
morality which the civil law undertakes to support. 
They foster morality and virtue as the civil state 
does, and more. They are profoundly interested in 
the enlightenment and education of the people and 
take strenuous measures to assist therein. They 
labor for the maintenance of high character in all the 
relations of life and in all departments of human 
activity. In these respects, I say, they seem not in 
antagonism but in entire harmony with the state, 
while they represent the best, the most progressive, 
and the most enlightened portion of the population. 

2. In general, I may say, there is no apprehension 
that they will ever do the government any harm. The 
voice of the Republican convention at Minneapolis, 
with reference to the relation of church and state, has 
not in it any thought that the large majority of these 
churches will ever give the government any trouble 
whatever. They know that they will not. Occupy- 
ing the attitude which they do, the relations of these 
churches to the state are rather matters of philosophi- 
cal inquiry than of practical urgency. I might raise 



Church and State: their True Relations. 269 

the question Here before all the varied forms of Chris- 
tian belief which are represented in this audience to- 
day, what interest have you in considering the rela- 
tion of the Baptist Church as an organization to the 
state ; or of the Congregationalist, or the Episco- 
palian, or the Methodist ? Your interest is merely 
theoretical. You know the relation of these churches 
to the state, and you know, be you Republican, Demo- 
crat, or Prohibitionist, that the planks in the platforms 
protesting against the union of church and state have 
nothing whatever to do with these churches, either 
with their statutes or their civil life or their religious 
ideas, their administration or their discipline. The 
question, then, is being very rapidly narrowed down. 

3. I promised you a practical discussion. We can- 
not have it concerning these denominations in gen- 
eral : but among the religious organizations classed as 
churches in this country, there are two which have 
raised the gravest fears and awakened the most serious 
doubts in the minds of all intelligent and thoughtful 
people. One of these is Mormon, the other is Ro- 
man. When this plank of the platform of politicians 
and statesmen is made, it does not intend to go out- 
side of these two. (Applause.) 

And when you think of the relation of church and 
State in this country as having in it anything to fear 
or anything to dread, your thoughts never go outside 
of those two. The Mormon Church has given us a 
great deal of trouble. It has assumed to have direct 
revelation from heaven and that nobody should inter- 
fere with it in carrying out those directions however 
immoral. Its head was the president and civil ruler 



270 Church and State : their True Relations. 

of all its members. It set up a domestic morality of 
its own which was immoral. It exacted tithes of its 
people which were oppressive. It favored the idea 
of blood atonement, and murdered those of its mem- 
bers who could not be otherwise forced to follow its 
dictates. It assaulted settlers and even the troops of 
the United States. It educated its children only in 
the tenets of the church and not to make them 
good citizens. This church, this Mormon Church in 
a distant part of our country, was believed and is be- 
lieved to be dangerous to the common welfare. The 
general government has legislated concerning it. 
They have tried to diminish the power of its hierarchy. 
They have legislated against its immorality. They 
have taken away its property and its tithes. They 
have set up schools in order to make its people intelli- 
gent. Still there is very grave apprehension as to the 
influence of Mormonism throughout the country. 
And Utah is not a State to-day solely and only because 
the pressure of the moral and religious sentiment of 
America is so strong against the admission as a State 
of the territory governed by hierarchs and favoring 
the violation of the laws of the United States. 

3. The Roman Church also has done all these 
things. Scattered more widely, it has not yet received 
special attention from the government, but it has given 
special attention to the government. It also claims 
direct revelation from heaven, perfect, absolute, and 
dictatorial. It also claims the supremacy of its lead- 
ing priests and hierarchs over all civil rulers and 
affairs. It also gives us in its moral theology an 
amount of obscenity, and in the celibate life of its 



Church and State: their True Relations. 271 

priests and nuns an amount of immorality, which is 
apparent to any student of history and startling to 
every lover of the home. It also oppresses the people 
who are under its care and enriches itself by despoil- 
ing them. It also, in a hundred cases, has left the 
people illiterate, and would in this country neglect to 
teach them if there was not money for priests in paro- 
chial schools. (Applause.) It is this curse and the 
other, but mostly this, which is the object of the 
thought of our statesmen when they look to the dan- 
ger which may arise from the union of church and 
state. Are you afraid here of the probable influence 
of Mormonism on this part of the country ? No, I 
think not. So then, to be practical, this discussion, 
in order to have relations to you, must be narrowed 
down still farther, and to this point. The question 
is : Shall Romanism rule the United States, or shall the 
United States rule Romanism? This question I pro- 
pose to discuss. 

III. The Roman Catholic Church is in conflict 
with the state at many points. We have now been 
in existence as a nation something over a hundred 
years, and I think we know pretty well what we want 
in our civil government. We have carried out to an 
extent our Constitution, have legislated through this 
century and have crystallized quite a little, have 
gained in intelligence no doubt very much, are rising, 
I think, in moral tone, have learned more about the 
history of the world, and I may say, addressing an 
audience of intelligent American citizens in this old 
Bay State, that the state knows about what it wants. 
It knows also about what it does not want. 



272 Church and State: their True Relations. 

1. We do not want a state church supported from 
the public treasury : of that we are sure. (Applause.) 
Neither state funds nor state control are best for 
churches in European or American countries. But 
disestablishment is sure to come, and we all favor 
such severance of the church from the state. We 
know that we do not want any church in this country 
supported by the state. 

We do not want a church which owes supreme 
allegiance to a foreign ruler : we are very certain of 
that. The doctrine of James Monroe that we do 
not want European powers on this continent is not 
more firmly fixed in the minds of the American peo- 
ple than this kindred proposition, that we do not 
want a church which owes supreme allegiance to a 
foreign head. We know that we do not want any 
of our citizens under an absolute monarchy. I am 
just as much interested in having the humblest Irish 
boy in this country a freeman as I am in having my 
own boy a freeman. (Loud applause.) An abso- 
lute monarchy is not good enough for any boy on 
American soil whom I ever looked in the face. 
(Applause.) We do not want a church which 
exacts of its officers an oath that they will obey a 
foreign ruler. The Roman Catholic Church exacts 
that oath of its bishops and its priests if not of its 
members. For I am sure we agree on this, no oath 
of allegiance will be tolerated in America to any 
other than the American state. (Applause.) 

We do not want a church which takes its politics 
from Rome. Mgr. Preston, before a court of law in 
New York City, says, " Every Roman Catholic must 



Church and State : their True Relations. 273 

take his politics from Rome." We are just as cer- 
tain as we were before he said it, that we do not 
want anybody in this country to take his politics 
from Rome. 

We do not want a church which in matters of 
common law refuses to submit to the civil govern- 
ment. We do not want a church which attempts to 
over-ride by force or by fraud what it does not agree 
with. We do not want in this country a church 
which opposes the widest diffusion of the kind of 
education among the people which will make them 
fit to be citizens of the American Republic. We do 
not want a church which demands for her priests 
that they be exempt from the action of the common 
law and be tried only by ecclesiastical courts. No 
matter who is the priest, he is only a man, and as a 
man, the courts of the United States are good enough 
to judge him for this world. (Loud applause.) 

We do not want, we know we do not want in this 
country, a church which assumes the right to nullify 
the laws and which affirms that this or that law shall 
be null and void, as Pius IX. affirmed in the case of 
half a dozen countries, some on this continent and 
some in Europe, within the last thirty years. We 
do not want a church in this country that is resolved 
to change the laws in violation of the liberties of the 
people, in order to enhance her own power. 

2. We do not desire in our territory any organiza- 
tion which does any of these things, whether it is a 
church or not ; and yet we are no less certain of the 
fact that every one of these things which we do not 
want in this country is part of the fundamental law 



274 Church and State : their True Uelations. 

and purpose of the Roman Catholic Church. In 
matters of education, of allegiance, of jurisdiction, 
of property, the Roman Church, like the Mormon 
Church, has taken a position in absolute antagonism 
not only to this government as such, but to any form 
of government like our own ; and if the Mormon 
Church by its attitude is in real conflict with the 
government of this country, much more is the 
church whose dictator and whose divinity sits en- 
throned on the shores of the Tiber. 

IV. Moreover, as I discuss the relation of church 
and state, that is, the relation of the Roman Catho^ 
lie Church to the American state, I am prepared to 
avow and defend a principle as broad as this : No 
interest is represented by the government of this 
country which would be safe in the hands of the 
Roman Catholic hierarchy. I repeat and emphasize : 
No interest is represented by the government of this 
country which is or would be safe in the hands of the 
Roman Catholic Church. 

Manifestly there are interests which are common 
to us all. Some of us are rich and some of us poor ; 
of some of us it may be said that we tremble on the 
verge of age, and of others that we are faltering on 
the threshold of youth ; some of us are uneducated, 
others of us are trained to the highest point of which 
our minds are capable. But whatever we are, and 
whatever our personality or our peculiarities, there 
are profound interests common to us all which are 
an essential part of the national and civil life, and 
these things, which are so obvious as to be beyond 
debate, which are so dear as to be beyond price, 



Church and State: their True Relations. 275 

would not be safely administered if in the hands 
of the Roman Catholic Church. 

1. Would freedom of the person be safe under her 
jurisdiction ? Ask the Inquisition, not the Inquisi- 
tion of three hundred yeare ago, but the Inquisition 
of 1870, which enlightened Italy at that time stamped 
under foot. Ask the history of the states where 
Rome has had supreme sway, the papal states as they 
were when Victor Emmanuel entered Rome, when 
every free man was likely to be taken out of his bed 
at night by the spies of the papacy, and without trial 
or jury incarcerated for an indefinite time in the dun- 
geons of the church. 

Would freedom of opinion be safe in this country 
if the Roman Church had power ? Ask the Index, ask 
the thousand anathemas of the church, ask the history 
of the .Montreal Institute, the Institute Canadien, 
where but a few years ago the church fought with 
all its might and intensest bitterness against an or- 
ganization which had for its purpose the cultivation 
and enlightenment of men, because they had avowed 
toleration of opinion as one of their principles. 
Would freedom of opinion be safe \\dth the bishops, 
with those who excommunicated Von Dollinger, with 
Archbishop Corrigan persecuting McGlynn, with 
Bishop McQuaid pursuing Lambert, with Bishop 
Elder threatening Editor Owen Smith ? Would free- 
dom of opinion, I ask, be safe in the hands of these 
hierarchs. (Sensation.) 

2. Would freedom of conscience ? Ask the sylla- 
bus of 1864, the infallible word of the infallible pope. 
When did ever freedom of conscience thrive under 



276 Church and State : their True Relations. 

Romish despotism? Ask the myriads of Roman 
Catholic people who have no conscience of their own, 
but simply the conscience of the priests for their guide, 
whose ideas of morals are made up on what is told 
them, and who have no more idea of personal con- 
science as you have it than they have of liberty as 
you define it, or truth as you hold it. 

Would education be safe in the hands of the Roman 
hierarchy ? Ask the countries which she has educated. 
Ask the children of Spain and of Italy, of Portugal, 
of France, of Austria and of Hungary, of Mexico and 
South America. The great educational interests of 
this Republic are of more concern than its tariff or all 
its material productions ; but those interests, so vast 
and so glorious, can never be intrusted safely to the 
Roman Catholic Church. (Applause.) 

Can we trust them to govern the family and regu- 
late marriage ? Ask Chili, ask Ecuador, ask Peru, ask 
Mexico. Can we intrust to them the care of the 
family ? May we not well pause to consider a recent 
tragedy in these United States menacing to every 
home, which is, I doubt not, fresh in the minds of many 
of you. When Walker Blaine died, many of you were 
deeply saddened for the sake of his father, who leaned 
on this promising son, already illustrious and giving 
promise of a brilliant future. When the married 
daughter so quickly followed her brother to the tomb, 
we all, irrespective of every sentiment but that of ten- 
der humanity, felt a deep sorrow for the most brilliant 
man in American citizenship, who alas ! was not re- 
moved by high station from the bereavements of our 
common lot. When last night we heard that Emmons 



Church and State : their True Relations. 277 

Blaine also was dead, I do not doubt that many a 
man who criticised the illustrious father a fortnight 
ago went home with wet eyes when he thought of 
that father's heart breaking under this almost unbear- 
able loss. Yet the heaviest blow which has fallen on 
that illustrious man in all these years has been not 
the death of his dear ones, nor the disappointments 
incident to a political career, but that when his 
youngest son, a mere lad, buoyant and careless as 
many a lad might be, was led by a Roman Catholic 
girl some years his senior to a Roman Catholic priest 
in the city of New York, that priest, consulting the 
archbishop of New York, who will never forgive James 
G. Blaine that he is not a Roman Catholic, the arch- 
bishop directed his priest to pierce the very heart of 
that family by performing a marriage ceremony for 
which the youth was in no wise fitted. The priest 
could have telegraphed the father, and learned in a 
half -hour of time whether his consent would be ac- 
corded. This he well knew, but I believe that Arch- 
bishop Corrigan desired the marriage of young Mr. 
Blaine in order that he might annoy, insult, abuse, 
and degrade if possible, one of the greatest men that 
America ever had and one of its most prominent fami- 
lies. (Applause.) When I heard it, I wrote his 
father to that effect, that he might know that among 
many American hearts there were some who knew 
the inveterate hatred of these celibate hierarchs to the 
family which repudiates them, and I said to him that 
in Mr. Blaine's person and Mr. Blaine's family they 
struck a blow at every citizen and family of the nation. 
Could we trust the family to them? God forbid. 
(Applause.) 



278 Church and State: their True Relations. 

3. Could we trust the finances of the country to 
them? As well trust Captain Kidd and Jack Cade 
with your money I (Applause.) How have they ad- 
ministered the finances of countries ? They have 
made them bankrupt. Laveleye, the great French 
Catholic, says in his remarkable essay on the Roman 
Catholic and Protestant nations, that the relation of 
Romanism to the finances of nations is one of injury 
and disaster. He says while English three per cents 
are at ninety-two, French three per cents are at sixty 
only ; while the funds of the Dutch, the Prussians, 
and the Swedes are at par (the government funds), 
those of Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal are lower 
by from thirty to fifty per cent. Wall Street knows 
if it would speak, the Bank of England knows if it 
would declare, the great political economists of the 
world know if they would affirm, that when Rome 
undertakes to handle their finances she ruins the 
people and destroys their credit. Could the nation 
trust Rome with its money? 

How as to public improvements, suppose we left to 
them the improvement of our surroundings in the 
state ? They would leave us like Ecuador, where they 
have not a road for a wagon outside Guayaquil, the 
capital. Could we trust to them the literature of the 
country, and to their censorship? Why, Laveleye 
says you may notice that the literature of Roman 
Catholic countries is in moral tone far below the lit- 
erature of Protestant countries. He contrasts the lit- 
erature of France and of England, shows us how vile 
is the one and how elevated the other. We cannot 
trust the literature of the land to them. No ; for 



Church and State: their True Melations. 279 

when their theology is so obscene that no man dares 
to print it in English, what can you expect of their 
literature ? (Applause.) 

Shall we trust them the government in any sense ? 
Can we ? I observe that in the latest and best ency- 
clopaedia of religious knowledge which has been pub- 
lished, the Schaff-Herzog, it is distinctly stated as 
to government, that in the papal states where the 
Pope had his own way entirely, the government was 
just as bad as it could possibly be. And this is true. 

4. You may ask any history, past or present, what 
practical beneficence has the Roman Catholic Church 
worked that she should be supreme in this nation. 
They lift their hands and vow that they will be 
supreme here. When they are supreme in this coun- 
try, there will remain of the national fabric only 
ashes, not even fire ; for the blood of freemen will 
have quenched even the coals of the conflagration. 
(Loud applause.) 

V. But I must hasten, for I see that the hour flies 
rapidly. The claims of the Church of Rome, on which 
she bases her right to rule, are false claims. You 
may observe that I repeat somewhat that I may sum 
up what I have said hitherto. You know that every 
lawyer before a jury (and I am reasoning with you as 
a jury of the American people) must needs repeat 
sometimes in order to come to just and impressive 
conclusions. So I reiterate that the claims of Rome to 
be supreme are false claims. They affirm that they 
alone represent God on earth in his proper right to 
rule. I would undertake to support another proposi- 
tion much more readily than that : I think I could 



280 Church and State : their True Relations. 

prove that the Roman Catholic rule is direct from the 
devil, not from God. (Applause.) I am certain that 
they can never prove it to be from God. Put it on 
grounds of history, of reason, or of revelation, on what 
they have done and produced, and the devilishness 
of it is clear while the godliness of it is invisible. 
(Applause.) 

Shall the state be supreme over the church ? they 
cry ; and Americans hesitate because they have not 
thought that question over very seriously. But I am 
ready to answer that when the state is more moral than 
the church, the state should be supreme over the 
church. There was a time when the churches of the 
South in these United States defended human slavery 
even with their lives. Which was the more moral, the 
state which abolished slavery, or the churches which 
sustained it ? Undoubtedly the state. Which, then, 
by every law of humanity, ought to be supreme ? 
The state. No one can dispute this proposition and 
be reasonable. The church, they say, should be 
supreme in the training of the young. That depends 
entirely on how it trains them. In Mexico the church 
had a chance to train the young and left them illiter- 
ate. Then the state took it up and taught them to 
read and write. Which had a right to supremacy, the 
church which had neglected them, or the state which 
taught them? Ask the intelligence of mankind at 
large. I think I may say that the state, using the 
term for the very broadest thought of civil govern- 
ment, and taking the world at large, has done more 
for the education of the young than the church, 
including all churches, save as they have been an 



Church and State : their True Relations. 281 

inspiration to the state. Certainly civil government 
has done much more to educate the people than has 
the Church of Rome. 

They say that the church has a right, as represent- 
ing God, to all the world's wealth, declaring that it 
is all his ; they avow the church to be his heir and 
assignee which ought to have it all. But you will 
notice that, in trying to be just and merciful, many 
nations of the world have taken away the property of 
the church in order that it might be used in a really 
benevolent and godlike way ; and in so doing, as they 
have taken it and distributed it, they certainly have 
shown more of the spirit of God than the church in 
seizing and holding it. The Romish principles are 
wrong, distinctly erroneous and false. I believe in 
the right of the best to rule ; and if the state is a 
great deal better than the church, as this American 
state is infinitely better than the Roman Catholic 
Church, then I say the state shall rule. (Applause.) 

The church, say they, is divinely ordered and should 
therefore govern the state; for, to the inferential 
idea, the state is not thus divinely ordered. But when 
this divinely ordered church governed the papal states 
and made everybody in them as wretched as they 
could be, except the priests and criminals, where 
were the evidences that it was a divine government ? 
And this day I believe there are more signs of God's 
presence in the government of the old State of Mas- 
sachusetts, more evidences that God is in this civil 
order, than there ever have been evidences that God 
was in the government of any state under papal con- 
trol ; and I tell you, my friends, when you know what 



282 Church and State : their True Relations. 

kind of a legislature we have, that is saying a good 
deal. (Laughter.) 

Thus her assumptions, one after another, can be 
shown to be entirely fallacious. 

VI. There are harmonies between the church and 
state which ought to exist, and cause them mutu- 
ally to help each other and mankind. They are 
both of divine origin, I may say, speaking of the 
church at large. The church proper is not the 
mechanical organization of any denomination, but the 
obedient followers of the Lord Jesus Christ in every 
denomination and outside of every denomination. 
The citizen and the Christian of any church and 
state unite in the same person, and perform duties 
incumbent on man toward his fellow, uniting in the 
same man the loyalty of the citizen with the devotion 
of the saint. The state is not organized for the ex- 
press purpose of teaching religion ; the church is : 
and both practise the law of God in human inter- 
course, as the one labors for the adjustment of their 
conditions here, and the other adds to that, labor and 
effort for their highest welfare hereafter. 

Church and state cannot coexist when the church 
stands for the few and the state for the many : when 
the church stands for despotism and the state stands 
for democracy, it is not possible that the two should 
agree or accord. When the church grows rich, and 
the nation grows poor 'as a consequence, the church 
and state cannot coexist. When the church annuls 
the laws which the nation makes, they cannot agree 
together. When the church educates not for citizen- 
ship in independent action, but only for obedience in 



Church and State: their True Relations. 283 

subordinate action, the two are diametrically opposite. 
When the church claims to declare the dictates of 
heaven and realizes less virtue, she cannot claim for 
herself supremacy over the more virtuous state. When 
the church rulers, as rulers, declare their ascendency 
over the elected rulers of the state, and demand the 
allegiance of state rulers to them, the church and 
state cannot coexist. When the church, any church, 
undertakes a monopoly of all religion, demands the 
state moneys for its support, and drives out all other 
forms of relief, then church and state cannot exist 
together. Professor Laveleye tells us that the 
Romish priests all over Europe are resolved that they 
will never submit to the government of the state, and 
they are therefore fomenting and preparing, as rapidly 
as they can, one of the most terrific revolutions in the 
annals of history. Having resolved that the church 
shall again be supreme as in mediseval times, so far as 
possible, they are working with assiduity and in- 
genuity as great as it is dangerous, to precipitate a 
conflict in which, while the nations are broken, the 
church shall rise to supremacy again. He might 
truly have said that the same is being done by the 
priests in this nation. The marshalled forces of the 
papal power have organized for the conquest of this 
country. They have carried the outworks. They 
have captured our great cities. As Fort Sumter fell, 
so the cities of America have fallen into the hands of 
the papacy. As Fort Sumter falling roused the 
nation, I would that these cities in their degradation 
might rouse us again. As yet we have taken it calmly, 



284 Church and State: their True Relations. 

idly, indifferently. Rise, freemen, rise, and make 
the principles of the Constitution of the United States 
forever supreme over the assumptions of any tyrant 
on these western shores. (Loud and repeated 
applause.) 



ROME'S AVOWED PURPOSE TO 
CONTROL THE STATE. 



The subject of my discourse to-day is : The 
Avowed Purpose of the Papacy to Rule this Nation: 
Her Success, especially in Great Cities. Very closely 
allied to this topic is the holy word which you will 
find in Psalms xii. 2 : " The wicked walk on every 
side when the vilest men are exalted." 

1. The opening sermon of this series was on Reli- 
gion and the State, in which I endeavored to show 
how intimately true religion is connected with our 
national life, and how antagonistic to that life is false 
religion. Then proceeding through a brief outline 
of the history of the colonial period of the Western 
Continent, I showed how Spanish Romanism had 
ruined the native peoples and laid the foundation of 
weak and disorderly states, while English Protestant- 
ism had laid the broad basis for a magnificent em- 
pire of liberty. With careful reasoning and abun- 
dant historical proofs, I then proceeded to point out 
the identity of the papal method of government with 
the worst kind of despotism, and to show that the 
Inquisition, as an agency of that tyranny, was an 

absolute necessity of the papal system of government, 

285 



286 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

and had continued to be used by it just as long as it 
had control. I then found one of the springs of the 
Inquisition in the papal greed of gold, and disclosed 
to you, with much pains-taking and care, that the 
avarice and rapacity of the priesthood had been with- 
out bound ; and then in our farther survey, in demon- 
stration of priestly covetousness, we learned that 
every civilized government where the papacy once 
had power had been compelled, sooner or later, to 
confiscate the property which it had unlawfully 
acquired ; and I suggested that such would be the 
inevitable outcome in this country, unless by taxation, 
as a more lenient measure, we in some way stayed 
the rapacity of the priests, and by enlightenment 
prevented the people from yielding their substance to 
the hierarchy. Last Sabbath I undertook briefly to 
define some relations of church and state, noting 
some of those principles in our government which 
can never but be dominant, and others which are 
contending with those for the supremacy. It is my 
purpose now, in a perfectly logical sequence, as 
approaching the culmination of this entire series of 
truths, to show you that the papacy has fully avowed 
its purpose to exercise supreme power over the gov- 
ernment of this country, and that this avowal, so far 
from being a mere wordy threat, has already been 
put into very remarkably active operation, and has 
been carried to a visible success. 

2. No text more than this which I have chosen, 
could illustrate more completely the great truth 
which has been repeatedly brought out in all these 
discourses. " The wicked walk on every side when 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 287 

the vilest men are exalted." The lamentable moral 
condition, or rather immoral degradation, the vicious- 
ness and wickedness of all papal countries, show 
how the wicked walk abroad, and by inference sug- 
gest that the rulers who control them, and who give 
them free opportunity for the exercise of their lusts 
and evil desires, must be among the vilest of men. 
Approached from the other side, namely, from the 
standpoint of the rulers, the truth is obvious, that 
where those in positions of high authority are vile, 
there the people on every side will ultimately 
become wicked. There is an intimate relation be- 
tween the vileness of rulers and the wickedness of 
peoples, and a corresponding influence of the wicked- 
ness of peoples in encouraging the vileness of rulers. 
I do not hesitate to say with a frankness which is 
re-enforced by myriad facts, that the exceeding moral 
wickedness of the cities of all papal countries is a 
proof of the vileness of their rulers ; and that the 
hierarchy of Rome, as rulers of the people, have 
never deserved the commendation which belongs to a 
high morality, either social, financial, or political. 
Having stated this with such clearness that I do not 
think you can mistake my meaning, I call upon you 
now at the opening of this discourse to remember so 
far as you can all that they have done, all the depths 
to which they have degraded the peoples whom they 
have governed, as a perfect vindication of a character- 
ization which would seem to be too severe, unless you 
had hitherto been made perfectly aware of the facts 
which support it. 

I desire at this time to show that their prin- 



288 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

ciples, which have been applied elsewhere, are 
avowedly in the direction of the control of this 
Republic ; that their purposes are not disguised, but 
are announced; that the material which tliey have 
at hand in this country with which to accomplish 
their purposes is altogether in accord with the text, 
and compatible with their designs and purpose, and 
then to show you finally, that they have already 
made good their avowals and their boasts, to an ex- 
tent which might well alarm any but the proudest, 
the most conceited, the most indifferent, and the 
most ignorant of American citizens. 

I. The principle of the full control of the state by 
the Pope is freely declared by the Roman Catholics. 
1. The great Von DoUinger, at the time when the 
infallibility decree was pending, said, '' If the in- 
fallibility of the popes be raised to a principle of 
faith, another doctrine that has been maintained by 
the popes since Gregory VII. will also receive the 
force of a dogma ; namely, the doctrine of the sub- 
mission of monarchs and kingdoms to the dominion 
of the Holy See, — a dominion which extends over 
secular and political matters. Every Catholic 
Christian is thus bound to believe, as a doctrine 
revealed of God, and which must be taught in every 
catechism, that the popes possess an absolute power 
over all princes and authorities ; over all states and 
commonwealths ; and that by their sovereign power 
they can interfere at discretion in all state affairs, 
depose princes, annul laws, and regulate war and 
peace. Pope Boniface VIII. 's Bull, ' Unam Sanc- 
tam,' is a solemn dogmatic decision, addressed to 



Homes Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 289 

the whole church, and declares a belief in all this to 
be a condition of everlasting salvation. This doc- 
trine was confirmed by Leo X. at the Synod of the 
Lateran, and a whole series of papal decrees is 
founded upon it." 

Yon Dollinger, as most of you know who have 
heard this series of discourses, was the most eminent 
scholar and historian in the Roman Catholic Church 
at the time when he wrote these words. 2. The 
Romanists affirm the supremacy of the Pope as 
strongly as the popes themselves have proclaimed it. 
They declare, without any hesitation, the duty of the 
people to resist the laws of the nation if those laws 
are contrary to those of the church. Pope Leo XIII. 
says, " Furthermore, in politics, which are insepar- 
ably bound up with the laws of morality and reli- 
gious duties, men ought always and in the first place 
to serve, as far as possible, the interests of Catholi- 
cism." Do you get the full force of this claim? "As 
soon as they" (that is the interests of Catholicism) 
"are seen to be in danger, all differences should 
cease between Catholics. The (papal) church can- 
not grant its patronage or favor to men whom it 
knows to be hostile to it; who openly refuse to 
respect its rights ; who seek to break the alliance 
established by the nature of things between religious 
(papal) interests and the interests of the civil order. 
On the contrary, its duty is to favor those, who, hav- 
ing sound ideas as to the relations between church 
and state, wish to make them both harmonize. These 
principles contain the rule according to which every 
Catholic ought to model his public life. It must be 



290 Homes Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

considered a duty by Christians (Roman Catholic) 
to be ruled and guided by the authority and leader- 
ship of the bishops, and especially of the Apostolic 
See. Man's duties, what he ought to believe and 
what he ought to do, are by divine right laid down 
by the church and in the church by the Supreme 
Pontiff. 

" If the laws of the state are in open contradiction 
with the divine law" (that is with the law of the 
church), "if they command anything prejudicial to 
the church, or are hostile to the duties imposed by 
religion, or violate in the person of the Supreme 
Pontiff the authority of Jesus Christ, then, indeed, 
it is a duty to resist them and a crime to obey them." 

3. What are some of the laws of the church which 
the Pope declares it is a duty to enforce in the face 
of all states ? I will read from the canon law of the 
Roman Catholic Church, as taught by Dr. G. F. Von 
Schulte, professor of Canonical Law at Prague, 
which contains the following declarations : — 

" IV. The Pope has the right to give countries 
and nations which are non-Catholic to Catholic 
regents, who can reduce them to slavery." 

" Y. The Pope can make slaves of those Christian 
subjects whose prince or ruling power is interdicted 
by the Pope." 

" VII. The Church has the right to practise the 
unconditional censure of books." 

" VIII. The Pope has the right to annul state laws, 
treaties, constitutions, etc. ; to absolve from obedi- 
ence thereto, as soon as they seem detrimental to 
the rights of the church or those of the clergy." / 
am reading the law of the Roman Catholic Church. 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 291 

" IX. The Pope possesses the right of admonishing, 
and if needs be of punishing, the temporal rulers, 
emperors, and kings, as well as of drawing before the 
spiritual forum any case in which a mortal sin occurs. 

"X. Without the consent of the Pope no tax or 
rate of any kind can be levied upon a clergyman, or 
upon any church whatsoever." Two Sunday^s ago 
I was telling about the desirability of taxing church 
property. Did you know that you cannot tax the 
church property in this country without the consent 
of the Pope ? (Laughter.) 

"XI. The Pope has the right to absolve from 
oaths, and obedience to the persons and the laws of 
the princes whom he excommunicates." 

" XIII. The Pope can release from every obliga- 
tion, oath, vow, either before or after being made." 

" XIV. The execution of papal commands for the 
persecution of heretics causes remission of sins." 

" XV. He who kills one that is excommunicated is 
no murderer in a legal sense." 

Cardinal Manning, in Donahoe^s Magazine of De- 
cember, 1888, says, " It is an obligation to obey the 
civil ruler ; but if the civil ruler shall make a law 
hostile to (papal) faith we must then be Catholics 
first and citizens afterwards." In volume III. of 
Ecclesiastical Sermons, page 83, this same cardinal 
asks, " Why should the Holy Father touch any mat- 
ter in politics at all? For this plain reason, be- 
cause politics are a part of morals. Politics are 
morals on the widest scale." Moreover, Cardinal 
Manning gives his indorsement to a book prepared 
for the use of the Roman Catholic colleges and 



292 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

schools, by the Rev. F. X. Schouppe, of the Society 
of the Jesuits, which says (p. 278), "The civil laws 
are binding on the conscience only so long as they 
are comformable to the rights of the Catholic 
Church." And further, Vicar-General Preston, in a 
sermon preached in New York, January 1, 1888, made 
this announcement : " Every word Leo speaks from 
his high chair is the voice of the Holy Ghost, and 
must be obeyed. To every Catholic heart comes no 
thought but obedience. It is said that politics is not 
tvithin the province of the Church, and that the 
Church has only jurisdiction in matters of faith. 
You say, ' I will receive my faith from the Pontiff, 
but I will not receive my politics from him.' This 
assertion is disloyal and untruthful. You must not 
think as you choose : you must think as Catholics. 
The man who says, ' I will take my faith from Peter, 
but I will not take my politics from Peter,' is not a 
true Catholic. The Church teaches that the Su- 
preme Pontiff must be obeyed, because he is the 
vicar of the Lord : Christ speaks through him." 

The same doctrine was uttered by priest Bodfish, 
at a hearing in the State House of Massachusetts, 
held between the 20th of March and the 25th of 
April, 1889. In answer to a question by Governor 
Long, who said, " You are bound to receive, believe, 
and disseminate the word of the Pope ? " he said, 
" Yes sir," having fully explained it before in terms 
like the above. Moreover, in the encyclical letter of 
November 7, 1885, Leo XIII. thus speaks : " Every 
Catholic should rigidly adhere to the teachings of 
the Roman Pontiff, especially in the matter of mod- 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 293 

em liberty, which, already under the semblance of 
honesty of purpose, leads to destruction. We exhort 
all Catholics to devote careful attention to public 
matters, and take part in all municipal affairs and 
elections, and all public services, meetings, and 
gatherings." Then they ought to be here, in this 
hall. (Laughter.) "All Catholics must make 
themselves felt as active elements in daily political 
life in countries where they live. All Catholics 
should exert their power to cause the constitutions 
of states to be modelled on the principles of the 
(Roman Catholic) Church." Perhaps I have read 
enough of that to make it perfectly clear to you 
that their principles are distinctly and unequivocally 
avowed. 

4. Now I ask you, in the name of common sense, 
why do not the American people believe statements 
like these, when we tell them that therein are em- 
bodied the principles and purposes of the papacy ; 
and why do some of you permit my word to be called 
in question without contradiction, when I have never 
assumed to state more than has been avowed by 
the canonical law, the councils and the popes ? (Ap- 
plause.) I speak forth the words of truth and sober- 
ness, and that man is a coward or a knave who 
calls names instead of furnishing most ample con- 
tradiction by citation and argument, if such there be. 
(Applause.) Paul said, '^ I am not mad," but if he 
had lived now I do not know but he would have got 
mad just because he used his reason. (Applause.) 

5. Further than this, let me read ypu where Leo 
XIII. in his encyclical of January 10, 1890, declares 



294 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State, 

that " politics are inseparably bound up with the 
laws of morality and religious duties." This declara- 
tion is ex cathedra^ and therefore infallible the end 
of controversy to all good Roman Catholics. But 
the revised Statutes of the United States declare 
(a little American law may be put in contrast with 
papal demands) : " The alien seeking citizenship 
must make oath to renounce forever all allegiance 
and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or 
sovereignty, in particular that to which he has been 
subject." The Roman Catholic profession of faith, 
having the sanction of the Council which met at 
Baltimore in 1884, contains the following oath of al- 
legiance to the Pope : '' And I pledge and swear 
true obedience to the Roman Pontiff, vicar of Jesus 
Christ, and successor of the blessed Peter, prince of 
the Apostles." Behold the law of the Republic set 
at naught by the Romish Council ! The Pope claims 
absolute authority over states, legislatures, laws, and 
politics. The Roman Catholic swears allegiance to 
the Pope in all these respects. Hold that steadily in 
your mind. 

Moreover, the supremacy of the Pope is not con- 
fined to politics ; but, to show you the breadth of his 
claims, allow me to give one further quotation from 
his infallible statements. " Familiar Explanation of 
Catholic Doctrine," by Rev. M. Miiller, published by 
Benziger Bros, in 1888, is a Roman catechism, used 
in the parochial schools, bearing the imprimatur of 
Cardinal Gibbons, and strongly commended by many 
Roman prelates. The following extracts are from 
No. IV. of the series. "The Pope could not dis- 



Homes Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 295 

charge his office as the teacher of all nations unless 
he were able with infallible certainty to proscribe and 
condemn doctrines, logical^ scientific^ physical^ meta- 
physical^ or political of any kind, which are at vari- 
ance with the Word of God " (which does not mean 
the Bible, but means the word of the Pope), "and im- 
peril the integrity and purity of the faith" (that is 
the papal faith), " or the salvation of souls" (which 
word salvation of souls, of course, is used in their 
very peculiar sense, as brought about by priests). 

6. These avowals of the papacy have been put in 
practice in Canada to a degree to which they have 
not as yet been practically applied here. The inter- 
ference of priest and Jesuit in Canadian politics has 
come to be much more open than it is in American 
politics as yet, though we are rapidly nearing their 
standard and action. On September 22, 1875, the 
seven bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Can- 
ada issued a pastoral letter on the eve of a pending 
election, in which they gave certain advice, entirely 
comformable to all which I have read and cited above, 
to all their priests and to all their people throughout 
the Dominion of Canada. These bishops claim abso- 
lute political control. They claim that the priests 
should direct their parishioners how to vote. They 
declare that the priests should name the candidate, 
and should direct the people whom to support and 
whom to reject ; and the sole basis of their favor or 
hostility was to be the friendliness or the* hostility 
of these various candidates to the papal church. 
Bishop Rogers, of Chatham, one of them, claimed the 
absolute right of the church, through its pastors, to 



296 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

direct all politics ; and declared that there was no pos- 
sible independence in the matter, in which he was 
fully supported by the united pastoral. The bishop's 
letter was approved at Rome. All these facts and 
statements, cited in detail, I hold in my hand, with 
date and place and name extendedly drawn out. 
The Roman authorities commended the bishops. 
What happened as a result? The electors in Canada 
were threatened with excommunication if they 
should vote differently from what the priests di- 
rected; and when these matters were brought before 
the courts after the election, it was there, under oath, 
made clear that in some cases the priest had told his 
people that he and not the elector was responsible 
for the vote cast : they must vote as he dictated. 
It was further sworn to by many electors that they 
voted under the threat of excommunication, and be- 
lieved that they would be damned in hell if they 
voted differently from what the priests had com- 
manded them. Mgr. Gaume, of Canada, who issued a 
catechism concerning liberalism, by which is meant 
the doctrine in Canada which rejects the excessive 
claims of the papacy, affirms all the above principles 
as I have read them, and the archbishop of Canada 
had the impudence to recently write to a British 
peer telling him that the church held the balance of 
power in Canada, and that it would direct that power 
according to its preferences : let the home govern- 
ment take notice. 

7. The above principles are announced with entire 
unreserve all over the world as the purpose of the 
papacy. Leo XIIL, as I have already read in your 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 297 

hearing, in 1885 commands the people that they g-ive 
especial attention to politics. " All Catholics must 
make themselves felt as active elements in daily 
political life in countries where they live. If Catho- 
lics are idle, the reins of power will easily be gained 
by persons whose opinions can surely afford little 
prospect of welfare. Hence, Catholics have just 
reason to enter into political life : having in mind the 
purpose in introducing the wholesome life-blood of 
Catholic wisdom and virtue into the whole system of 
the state. All Catholics who are worthy of the name 
must work to the end, that every state be made conform- 
able to the Christian model we have described." That 
prominent Catholic authority, Dr. Brownson, in his 
Review for July, 1864, declared : " Undoubtedly it is 
the intention of the Pope to possess this country. In 
this intention he is aided by the Jesuits and all the 
Catholic prelates and priests." Father Hecker in his 
last work, published in 1887, says : "The Catholics 
will outnumber, before the close of this century, all 
other believers in Christianity put together in the 
republic." Then he warns us to look out for what 
they will do. In 1853 the editor of the Freeman's 
Journal, D'Arcy Magee, undertook to get the priests 
of this country to do what they could to take the 
poor Irish Roman Catholics out of great cities, and to 
spread them over the fertile lands of the West ; but, as 
one of the priests of that time present in the Buffalo 
Convention tells us, they all opposed this idea, saying 
their policy w^as not to scatter but to bring together 
their forces in the great cities, and at strategic points 
to make the assault which would issue in the downfall 



298 Home's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

of American liberty. That convention was held n early- 
forty years ago, and they have been as good as their 
word since, as you and I will see before my address 
closes. 

8. Manifestly in all this, there is great peril to the 
nation. May I quote a word from a most eminent liv- 
ing English historian, namely, James Anthony Froude, 
who, discoursing on the subject "What a Catholic 
Majority could do in America," says, " Every true Cath- 
olic is bound to think and act as his priest tells him, 
and a Republic of true Catholics becomes a theocracy 
administered by the clergy. It is only as long as 
they are a small minority that they can be loyal subjects 
under such a constitution as the American. As their 
numbers grow, they will assert their principles more and 
more. Give them the power, and the Constitution 
will be gone. A Catholic majority, under spiritual 
direction, will forbid liberty of worship, and will try 
to forbid liberty of conscience. It will control edu- 
cation : it will put the press under surveillance : it 
will punish opposition with excommunication, and 
excommunication will be attended with civil disabili- 
ties." Surely the calm and learned opinion of a great 
historian is deserving of consideration, especially 
when he speaks in harmony with all that we know 
from a thousand years of history. 

II. But some of you listening have been saying, 
" What if these are their principles ? They can never 
apply or enforce them." Have you considered what 
material they have for enforcing them ? Have you 
considered the army which is at their back in their 
attempt to make these ideas practical ? If not, bear with 



Homes Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 299 

me while I marshal that army before you. You know 
the character of the following of the Roman Catholic 
priests in this city. You know how the priests 
and their people follow the bishop. You know how 
those bishops and their dioceses follow the cardinals, 
and you know that the cardinals are the creatures of 
the Pope. These are the officers and the privates of 
their army of aggression. Let us look at the agents 
by whom they hope to win their victories and accom- 
plish their purposes. 

At the head of these are the Pope, the cardinals, 
the archbishops, the bishops, and the priests. The 
rank and file who obey them are a vast host. 

1. First of all they rely in this countrj^ for the 
accomplishment of their purposes to subordinate the 
state on foreigners : on not merely those who were 
born in foreign countries, but those who are essentially 
foreign in every respect. The present transplanting 
of the French Romanist from the Province of Quebec 
into New England and the United States is one of 
the marvellous movements of the last few years. One 
of the most distinguished doctors of divinity in New 
England has recently written an article in one of our 
leading magazines, in which he distinctly says that 
the coming of these hosts of Canadians is believed to 
be a part of the direct purpose of the priests to subvert 
civil government in this country, and he is not an 
alarmist either. This opinion is entertained by intel- 
ligent Canadian Protestants and French Protestants 
in the United States. There are said to be four 
hundred thousand French Canadians in New England, 
and a million and a quarter in the United States. 



300 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

Almost all of them are papists. Nearly every one of 
them is a follower of the priests. It is not easy to 
tell accurately how many there are, but there is no 
difficulty in determining where they stand in this 
great conflict. The Ninety-third Annual Report of 
the Home Missionary Society of the State of Massa- 
chusetts reveals the following among other facts 
about French Canadians in the State of Massachusetts. 
Here is a table taken from the French Guide of the 
United States, which shows us that in this, our own 
Worcester County, there are at least six towns in 
which the French Canadians number from fifty to 
sixty-one per cent of the entire population. " Take 
a group of nine towns in Worcester County, — Doug- 
las, Webster, Spencer, Southbridge, Sutton, Brookfield, 
West Boylston, North Brookfield, and Millbury, — 
and, out of a total population of 41,395, there are 20,642 
French Canadians, or one-half. Add Worcester and 
Fitchburg, with a joint population of 106,692, and 
3^ou have added 19,819 French Canadians, so that 
your proportion is still more than one-quarter. It is 
twenty-seven per cent. It is believed, upon reliable 
information, that these figures give an understatement 
of the number of French Canadians. These figures 
give some sense of the proportions of the French 
Canadian problem — a problem that will grow on our 
hands as the years go on. And it does not concern 
Massachusetts alone of the New England States ; for 
while by these figures, which are probably too small, 
we have 7 1-2 per cent French Canadians, Maine has 8 
per cent. New Hampshire 12 per cent, Vermont 9 1-2 
per cent, Connecticut 3 7-10 per cent, and Khode Island 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State, 301 

10 4-5 per cent. As a whole, tlie percentage in New 
England is 7 4-5 per cent. 

" These are relied upon as a part of the foreign 
army of the Pope in the United States. But suppose 
you turn to the great cities, and observe the national- 
ity of the people who are in them controlled politi- 
cally by the priests and their servants. In the city 
of New York, Mayor Hewitt declares, in a message 
which he himself prepared, that according to the 
census of 1880, 39 1-2 per cent of the people were 
foreign born, and an additional 40 1-2 per cent were 
born of foreign parentage ; in the city of New York, 
therefore, he says more than 80 per cent of the people 
are foreigners. There are thirty-seven nationalities 
speaking eighty different dialects." All these are 
voting according to their numbers. See the enor- 
mous power of foreigners in New York, many of whom, 
I admit, are good and reliable American citizens, but 
many of whom are not; and a large proportion are 
the blind slaves of the papal purposes. 

2. Not only do the priests confidently rely upon the 
foreigners, but they as confidently rely on the illiter- 
ate. Three-fourths of the French Canadians cannot 
read and write. They are therefore all the more 
reliable for priestly purposes. What are the facts 
about illiteracy as fostered and exploited by the 
priests of Rome ? There are numerous Roman 
Catholic countries which have been such for centuries 
that are more illiterate than China. In China fifty per 
cent are illiterate, but in Hungary fifty-one per cent, in 
Chili seventy-three, in Poland ninety-one, in Mexico 
ninety-three, in Spain eighty, in Venezuela ninety, in 



302 Homers Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

Brazil eighty-four, in Portugal eighty-two, — so many 
out of a hundred people cannot read and write. 
Rome has to rely upon the people who cannot read 
and write for her power. (Applause.) This is why 
she hates our common schools. (Great Applause.) 

3. But does Rome rely on the illiterate, she also re^ 
lies upon the criminals. I say this without hesitation, 
because it is abundantly capable of proof. I am only 
afraid that I shall give you so much proof as to weary 
you. As illustrative of the walking of the wicked on 
every side when the priests are exalted : " A recent 
number of M Solfeo, an Italian journal of prominence, 
furnishes the following statistics: In 1870, that is 
before Rome was the capital of the kingdom of Italy, 
there were in the city (for a population of 205,000 
inhabitants) 2,469 secular clergy, among cardinals, 
bishops, prelates, and cures; 2,766 monks and 2,117 
nuns ; in all, 7,322 religious of both sexes. The 
number of births reached in the same year to 4,378, 
of which 1,215, were legitimate, and 3,163 illegiti- 
mate ; the illegitimates, therefore, being in the pro- 
portion of 75.25 per 100 of the total of births. Com- 
paring Rome with other capitals of Europe, it results 
that, for every 100 legitimate births, there are illegiti- 
mate : in London, 4 ; in Paris, 48 ; in Brussels, 9 ; in 
Rome, 143. Nor in regard to capital crime did the 
Pontifical states occupy a favorable position before 
they were annexed to Italy by King Victor Emanuel. 
The statistics corresponding to the latest years of the 
Pontifical government show that there was committed 
one murder in England for every 187,000 inhabitants; 
in Holland, one for every 168,000; in Russia, one for 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 303 

every 100,000 ; in Austria, one for every 4,113 ; in 
Naples, one for every 2,750 ; and in the estates of the 
Pope, one for every 750." Compare that with the 
187,000 of England. " A recent English paper says 
that the Roman Catholics in Scotland are less than 
one-twelth of the population, yet this one-twelth fur- 
nishes one-third of the criminals. In England and 
Wales, the Roman Catholics are one-twentieth of the 
population ; but the Roman Catholic prisoners are one- 
fourth of all prisoners." This is merely introductory 
to an array of figures which I have here, gathered and 
indorsed by so eminent an authority as the late Dr. 
Littledale of the Anglican Church. (See " Little- 
dale's Plain Reasons, Against joining the Church of 
Rome," pp. 203, 4, 5, as follows :) 

" On December 31, 1877, there were 4,289 criminal 
Protestant children detained in English reformatories, 
and 1,346 Roman Catholic ones, more than 24 per 
cent; in Clerkenwell prison, during 1877-8, there 
were 1,395 Roman Catholics out of 8,930, more than 
16 per cent ; in Wandsworth, 1,006 Roman Catholics 
out of 6,472, nearly 16 per cent ; in Coldbath Fields 
during 1877, 23 1-4 per cent. The ratio in Manches- 
ter for 1877-8-9 has been 43 per cent ; in one of the 
Liverpool jails 50 per cent and upwards ; and in the 
other, for 1871-79, 67 per cent of Roman Catholic 
prisoners, more than double all others together, the 
ratio of Roman Catholics in Liverpool, where they are 
denser than anywhere else in England, being 27.1 per 
cent in 1881. In Scotland, Roman Catholics are about 
8 1-2 per cent of the population, chiefly collected 
in Dundee and Glasgow. Their ratio of criminals in 



304 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

the jail of Dundee was 38 per cent; and in Glasgow 
44 1-3 per cent, in 1879. In Ireland, where Roman 
Catholics are 76.6 per cent of the population, their 
share of the crime in 1881-2 was 33,424 convicts out 
of a total of 38,968, or 86 per cent, which included, 
moreover, nearly all the serious offences, as the 
remaining 14 per cent consisted almost exclusively 
of petty offenders. In the Dominion of Canada 
Roman Catholics are much less than half the total 
population, the census of 1881 returning 1,791,982 of 
them out of 4,324,810, say 44 per cent ; but in 1880 
they had 10,286 criminals, against 9,304 of all other 
denominations, or 52 per cent of the total. The fig- 
ures are more remarkable in the province of Ontario, 
where there were in 1881 almost equal numbers of 
Roman Catholics and Anglicans --320,839 of the 
former and 366,539 of the latter. But the Roman 
Catholic criminals in 1880 were 4,152, as against 
1,944 Anglicans ; much more than double the nat- 
ural ratio. In Prussia, where the Roman Catholics 
are one-third (33.3 per cent) of the whole popula- 
tion, and not so relatively poor as in England, they 
produced, in 1870, 52.6 per cent of the criminals 
brought to trial; in 1871, 56.7 per cent; in 1872, 
56.3 per cent; in 1873, 58.2 per cent; in 1874, 57 
per cent ; in 1875, 63.5 per cent ; in 1876, 67.5 per 
cent; in 1877, 60.7 per cent ; in 1878, 63.7 per cent. 
What is more, a heavier proportion holds for the 
graver crimes. In 1878 the Roman Catholic murder- 
ers charged were 18.7 per cent more than the Prot- 
estant ones ; homicides were 53.5 per cent ; assaults, 
with fatal results, 38.6 per cent ; poisoning, 100 per 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 305 

cent ; serious and repeated cases of theft, 30 per cent ; 
robbery and extortion, 36 per cent ; common larceny, 
49.8 per cent ; in excess of the Protestant criminals. 
In The Netherlands, where the Roman Catholic ele- 
ment is over one-third of the population, there were 
(omitting all petty offenders), in 1877, 4.85 criminals 
in every thousand Protestants, but 5.34 in every 
thousand Roman Catholics ; in 1878 the figures 
were : Protestants, 4.87, Roman Catholics, 5.27 ; in 

1879, Protestants, 4.78, Roman Catholics, 5.39; in 

1880, Protestants, 4.73, Roman Catholics, 5.29." In 
Australia the following witness is borne by Sir 
Archibald Michie, Q.C., Agent-General for Victoria, 
and formerly Attorney-General there, in his " Read- 
ings in Melbourne," p. 194 (London, 1879) : "In 
nothing are Mr. Hayter's statistics more interesting 
than in the tables showing the relative number of 
arrests and convictions among the different religious 
sects. The Roman Catholics are on a most unenvi- 
able eminence in this respect. ' In proportion to 
their numbers in the community,' writes Mr. Hayter, 
'the Roman Catholics supplied more than twice as 
many arrested persons as the Protestants, and more 
than three times as many as the Jews and the 
Pagans. In view of a similar proportion, fewer Prot- 
estants were committed for trial than were members 
of any other of the sects distinguished. The total 
number of criminals executed from 1861 to 1876 was 
forty-one . . . Twelve of these forty-one were of the 
Church of England, twenty-one were Roman Catho- 
lics, two Presbyterians, three Wesleyans, and three 
Pagans. Thirty-six were cases of murder, and the 



306 Homers Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

residue capital cases of other kinds.' Now, bearing 
in mind that the proportion of the Catholic popula- 
tion to the Protestant was for many years less than a 
fourth, the above statement is a very startling one. 
No census has been taken since 1871 ; but the esti- 
mated number of all the Protestants in the year 1876 
was 610,469, and of the Roman Catholics, 198,067. 
The Roman Catholics thus, even now, number only 
between a third and a fourth of the population. In 
the United States, the comparative results are alleged 
to be of the same character, but the system of prison 
returns does not admit of tabulating them." 

These are most striking and threatening figures ; 
they show that everywhere Romanism is prolific of 
crime, that where the papacy rules conscience is 
debauched, morality degraded, and criminality en- 
couraged by the policy of the Roman Catholic 
Church. And when, therefore, I say that Rome 
relies in this great warfare against our liberties on 
criminals whom she has made such, I state facts 
without passion which are borne out by the statistics 
of the world. 

4. Take a view in our own State of Massachusetts, 
for we want to know the facts near home as well as 
far away. Of 665 prisoners in the State Prison of 
Massachusetts in 1885, 312 were Irish. I see no 
reason in the world why the Irish people should be 
criminal, excepting that they are debauched by pop- 
ery. The Irishmen of the north of Ireland, of Ulster, 
of the cities of Belfast and Londonderry, being 
largely Protestants, are not prolific in criminals. 
When I speak of the Irish Roman Catholic crimi- 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 307 

nals of Massachusetts and read these figures, God 
knows I have no race prejudice. The Irish people 
are as dear to me as any people in the world, but 
when I see them turned into criminals by a false 
system of religion, I may state the facts and resent 
the causes. (Applause.) 

In Massachusetts in 1885, of 3,426 in prisons, 1,377 
had one or both parents born in Ireland ; of 3,246 in 
prisons, only 257 had both their parents born in Mass- 
achusetts ; of 8,394 paupers, 5,320 had Irish parents ; 
of 122,263 illiterate, 13,898 were native born, while 
108,365 were foreign born. Nineteen per cent of the 
people in Massachusetts in 1885 who could not read 
and write were Canadian, fifty-five per cent were 
Irish, and only two and eight one-hundreths of the 
illiterates of Massachusetts were born of parents 
who were natives of this State. Do I not say well, 
when I survey even our own State, that the Roman 
Catholic Church is depending on the least compe- 
tent and least moral elements of society to govern 
the state, which she has avowed her purpose to rule, 
and that she makes and marshals law-breakers to 
annul our laws? 

5. But they are also relying on something else ; 
on what? They are relying on military societies, 
which they are forming all over this country, under 
the sanction of the priests. 

Do you want to know the names of some of them, 
military and semi-military ? The Ancient Order of 
Hibernians, Irish American Society, Knights of St. 
Patrick, St. Paul's Cadets, Apostles of Liberty, 
Knights of the Red Branch, Knights of St. Peter, 



308 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

Benevolent Sons of the Emerald Isle, Knights of 
Columbkill, the Clan-na-Gael, which has a horrible 
history in this country ; and of late they are relying 
to some extent on the Knights of Labor, in so far 
as they have given their allegiance to Cardinal Gib- 
bons and the Pope. In our own city there are 
military companies composed exclusively of Irish 
Roman Catholics and armed with Winchester rifles. 
I want to ask you if our militia are armed with Win- 
chester rifles ; and if they are not I want to know who 
gave these Winchester rifles, the best arms in the 
military service, to the Irish Roman Catholics? 
May I ask who would give Winchester rifles to 
Methodists and Congregationalists, if they should 
arm for the public defence ? If I were, as I am not, 
a member of the Order of United American Mechan- 
ics, I would buy guns and learn how to use them 
(Loud aj^plause), not because I desire to precipitate 
conflict, but for the precisely opposite reason, be- 
cause I desire to make conflict impossible by furnish- 
ing a national police who are not in subordination to 
the Pope of Rome. (Applause.) When I observe 
these military and semi-military companies ; when I 
know that a very large proportion of the police of 
great cities are of the same nationality, in the same 
ecclesiastical relation, and all dominated by the 
priests, I see in it all a fixed plan to precipitate a 
catastrophe for American liberty. (Applause.) 

But, you say, what does all this amount to? I 
answer, it amounts to this, that Gregory XVI. said 
there was no place in the world where he was pope 
so much as he was in America. Pius IX. uttered 



Homers Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 309 

the same sentiment. Leo XIII. confidently relies 
upon the same supposition. It reminds me, friends, 
that in every other land on the globe the Roman 
Catholic hierarchy is looked upon with suspicion, and 
watched as an enemy, save in the United States, 
where it is blind-folding the people and arming the 
assassins of liberty. (Sensation and cheers.) Well, 
you say, all this in way of preparation. 

III. What have they accomplished ? That is what I 
will now tell you. We know something of what they 
have done in other lands. We know how they obstruct 
government in other countries, and furnish untold 
trouble for those who are endeavoring to bring in 
light, liberty, and righteous law. What have they 
done ? " When in May, 1851, New Grenada pro- 
claimed religious toleration, and subjected the clergy 
to the secular courts, Pius IX., in the allocution 
' Acerbissimum,' of September 27, 1852, pronounced 
the laws to be null and void, and threatened heavy 
ecclesiastical penalties on all who should dare to en- 
force them. . . . When, in 1855, Mexico adopted a 
constitution embodying the same principles, Pius, in 
the allocution 'Nunquam fore,' December 15,1856, 
annulled the Constitution and forbade obedience to it. 
When, about the same time, Spain made an effort in 
the same direction, the allocution ' Nemo vestrum,' 
of July 24, 1855, similarly abrogated the obnoxious 
provisions. Even a powerful empire like that of Aus- 
tria fared no better when, in December, 1867, it decreed 
liberty of conscience and of the press, and in May, 
1868, adopted a law of civil marriage ; for the allocution 
' Nunquam certe,' of June 22, 1868, denounced all 



310 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

these as atrocious laws, and declared them to be void 
and of no effect." All this, be it remembered, tran- 
spired in modern times, within the memory of young 
men here present. I need not advert to Canada, but 
pass directly to our own country. What have they 
done ? 

1. They have already secured control of all the 
strategic points in America. Notice in New York 
city where everything is subordinate to the papacy, 
politically, morally, and financially. The mayor, 
Hugh J. Grant, publicly knelt to Corrigan, the arch- 
bishop, before a great audience, in a public hall, in 
March of 1892, and kissed the prelate's hand, in token 
of submission. This Mayor Grant, says the New 
York Times^ cannot compose and write a respectable 
English letter to save his life. A list of the munici- 
pal officers of the city of New York shows to what an 
extent they have gained control. From the New 
York Mail and Express^ November 7, 1888, I read : 
"The Roman Catholics have taken the city. Their 
hand was in the sale of the Coogan party to Hugh J. 
Grant. The}^ already have every member of the 
Board of Tax Commissioners. They have for years 
had and still have the control of the Board of 
Aldermen. They have the Mayor, the Sheriff, the 
Comptroller, the Counsel to the Corporation, the 
whole Board of Tax Assessors, the Commissioner of 
Public Works, the Superintendent of the Street 
Cleaning Department " (I should think so from the 
looks of the streets) (Laughter), " the Clerk to the 
Board of Aldermen, the Superintendent of the Bureau 
of Elections, several of the Justices of the Supreme, 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control tJie State. 311 

Superior, and Common Pleas Courts, the control of 
the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, the ma- 
jority in many of the ward boards of School Trus- 
tees, a large portion of the Board of Education, the 
control of the Department of Charities and Correc- 
tions, the majority in the police force, the control of 
the Fire Department, of the Board of Street Open- 
ings, the whole of the Armory Board, the Register 
of Deeds, the Commissioner of Jurors, one half of 
the Commissioners of Accounts, Supervisor of the 
City Record, the Collector of the Port, the Sub- 
Treasury, majority of the Commissioners of the Sink- 
ing Fund, the majority of the delegation in Congress 
and in the State Senate and Assembly." Is not New 
York in their power ? 

What is the character of some of these officers ? 
You have all heard, I suppose, the names of some of 
them as bosses, criminals, etc. In political conven- 
tions they have been very prominently before the 
country for the last two weeks, for what New York 
State may do politically means what the bosses of 
both parties are going to do in the city of New York, 
and these bosses are all on their knees to the Roman 
Catholic power. Commenting on the personal char- 
acter of these rulers, the New York World says, 
" Thomas Dunlap, a commissioner of jurors, with a 
salary of fifteen thousand dollars a year, began life as 
a dog-catcher, gained influence as a rum-seller, and 
passed from a gin-mill to a position where he practi- 
cally has charge of the jury-system of the city. Four 
aldermen keep one or two saloons each, and two of 
them keep ' bucket-shops ' and ' all-night ' dens. Rich- 



312 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

ard Crocker, coroner, with twelve thousand dollars a 
year, has been a prize-fighter, and only escaped con- 
viction for the crime of murder through his influence 
in Tammany counsels." " Richard Flanigan, another 
coroner at twelve thousand dollars a year, has been a 
prize-fighter and is a gambler. Jerry Hartigan, 
another member of the committee, has been tried for 
murder. The list might be extended, but a few shin- 
ing examples suffice to show what a city may expect 
which allows itself to be governed " by the Roman 
Catholic hierarchy. As to the financial management 
which they give to the city of New York, we have it 
stated that within a few years, the Roman Catholics 
have obtained three and a half million dollars worth 
of real estate from the city, without purchase or pay- 
ment ; that in eleven years they have received $6,000,- 
000 ; that in 1868 they took 1710,000 ; in 1879, |693,- 
000 ; that in seventeen years they have received 
nearly 111,000,000. The late distinguished Rev. Dr. 
Crosby had a worthy son, a representative at Albany, 
who says that about $600,000 annually are taken from 
the treasury of the State of New York appropriated to 
the following denominational uses : $25,000 to Jews, 
$65,000 to Protestants, $510,000 to Roman Catholics. 
The taxes in the city of New York are greater per 
capita than in any other great city in the world, so 
far as I know. In that city under papal government 
the cost per capita is more than $36.00, in Brooklyn 
less than $11.00 (I give the even dollars ; I have the 
cents also here, but you need not mind the cents when 
Rome's hand is in the treasury, for she does not count 
them), in Albany $13.00, in Philadelphia $16.00, in 



Rome 8 Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 313 

Buffalo 110.00, in Baltimore 110.00, in Cincinnati 
$14.00, in Cleveland 18.00, in Chicago 116.00, in 
Detroit fll.OO, in St. Paul $6.00, in Milwaukee |6.00, 
in St. Louis $14.00 ; and in London it costs $7.50, 
only one-fifth of what it costs in New York ; in Paris 
$5.40 one-seventh of the New York rate, in Berlin 
$7.35, per capita about the same as London. This 
is what they are doing, what they have already done, 
a glimpse of their financiering with taxpayers. You 
wanted to know what they accomplish ; I am telling 
you. We know that the influence of New York city 
has been final and controlling in national politics. 
Of this I need not speak at length on the present 
occasion. The great political parties have both, in 
their recent conventions, declared for Home Rule in 
Ireland ; I hope they have not declared for Rome 
Rule in America. (Applause. ) It looks very much 
as if they had. 

2. But now for Boston, our own imperial Boston, the 
Boston which we glory in as the modern Athens, 
which is in danger of becoming modern Cork (Ap- 
plause) ; the Boston which we remember as associated 
with the earliest struggles of American liberty, and 
which may be associated with its latest conflicts ; the 
Boston which we once thought of as possessing the 
most eminent names of the foremost citizens and lead- 
ing literary men of the country ; the Boston of Samuel 
Adams and Warren and Hancock, of Charles Sumner 
and Wendell Phillips. (Applause.) What of Boston? 
The population in 1848 was 128,000 ; it then had sixty- 
five police. The population in 1888 had increased/ot^r 
fold, and the police had to be increased thirteen fold. 



314 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

This tells you something of the kind of people who 
are filling it up. It is because Boston population has 
changed greatly and is very different to-day from 
what it was formerly that this great addition to its 
police has been made necessary. How about the 
government of the city of Boston, the men and the 
money? Twenty-five years ago, in 1866, when Mr. 
F. W. Lincoln was mayor of the city of Boston, there 
were but six Roman Catholics in the city government- 
To-day there are over fifty such. Forty years ago 
nearly all the money which was paid out of the 
public treasury was paid to officers with American 
names and Protestant lineage. To-day, of about six 
million dollars paid out of the treasury, nearly five 
and a half million is paid to Roman Catholics, in 
sums varying from six thousand dollars a year down 
to day wages. Four thousand and more of the 
employees of the city of Boston are Roman Catholics, 
who pay tax to the priests. Boston to-day is almost 
a Roman Catholic city. In 1888 Mayor O'Brien 
closed its public library on St. Patrick's Day. This is 
very suggestive, for saints' days and all which they 
involve have closed up the public intelligence of 
many a nation, and would do the same in this coun- 
try if Rome had its way. 

3. But what I have said of Boston is just as true 
of New England at large. What I have said of 
Massachusetts is the peril through all this little clus- 
ter of sister States. Bonahoe's Magazine for June, 
1888, calls Connecticut an Irish commonwealth, and 
says the Irish are in practical control of the state. As 
they said it in the way of boast, it cannot be offensive 



Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 315 

for me to state it as a fact. As you might infer from 
the name, Donahoe's Magazine is edited by an Irish- 
man and a Roman Catholic. This article names the 
members of the legislature, the mayors, and members 
of the city government in the nine cities of Bridge- 
port, Hartford, Meriden, Middletown, New Britain, 
New Haven, New London, South Norwalk, and 
Waterbury. I had those names before me when I 
made these notes which I am reading. Proceeding, it 
says, " Let the grand roll of the towns be called, and 
let further evidence be adduced to show that in Con- 
necticut at least, the term New England has become 
a misnomer, and that the term New Ireland has in- 
controvertible claims to present and future recogni- 
tion." Further, in a later issue. May, 1889, it says 
that the Roman Catholic is the leading form of wor- 
ship in New England. It quotes Boston and its 
officers as proof ; says that Holyoke and Springfield 
are all officered by Irish, from mayors to justices of 
the peace. Rhode Island is one-half Irish by birth 
and extraction, and three-fifths of its population for- 
eigners. New Haven is officered mostly by Irish. 
New England is no longer New England. Ah, you 
say, I cannot believe that. But you cannot deny 
facts; and I think the facts are as stated by them. 
Here is further proof. The superintendent of the 
religious census of the United States, in an article in 
the June number of the Forum, 1892 (p. 532), says, 
"There are a million communicants in the Catholic 
church in those six states (New England), against 
230,000 in the Congregational churches. This is one 
of the striking results of immigration and migration ; 



316 Rome's Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 

for while immigration has brought Catholics in, mi- 
gration has taken Congregationalists out to other 
parts of the country, particularly to the great West. 
New England is Roman Catholic." These are 
the words of the superintendent of the religious census 
of the United States, based on figures. You ask 
what Roman Catholics have done : this is my answer. 
The Roman Catholic strength in the territories is 
such that in the remaining territories of the United 
States they have four times the strength of the Prot- 
estants. In California, as compared with the Prot- 
estants, they are about four to one. You ask what 
they have done. They have avowed their purpose to 
control ; what have they done ? They have done as 
they promised. They have captured every strategic 
point in the United States ; they have subjugated 
our cities ; they have throttled our newpapers ; they 
have debauched our politicians ; they have robbed 
our treasuries ; they have stabbed our common 
schools ; and are advancing to complete control in 
this nation as fast as they can ; for what I have said of 
New York and of Boston and of Connecticut cities, 
is true in large proportion of Baltimore, of Chicago, 
of Cleveland, of Milwaukee, of Washington in the 
District of Columbia, and of many another city of the 
United States. I do not object to the nationality of 
any man, as I have often said ; but while I live I 
shall object to the control of the papacy in this Re- 
public. (Applause.) 

The story of Samson is full of suggestion. Con- 
secrated to God from his birth, he let grow his luxu- 
riant locks as a sign of his devotion to Jehovah. He 



Homers Avowed Purpose to Control the State. 317 

was the hope of his nation and the scourge of her ene- 
mies. The love of ease and the lust of pleasure led 
him to lay his head in a harlot's lap. She treacher- 
ously sought for the secret of his power for many a 
day, but in vain. At length she learned it; and when 
she had sheared from his head the only sign left to 
show that he recognized, even in his sin, a divine 
allegiance, she cried with the voice with which she 
had lulled him to sleep, now a voice of terrible 
threatening, " The Philistines be upon thee, Sam- 
son." And blind and chained, the last hope of Israel 
ground in the prison-house, while his enemies made 
sport. Only at his death was he avenged. The Ameri- 
can Samson, with the locks indicative of a divine 
allegiance on his mighty head, has been seduced from 
highest aims and noblest purposes, as they were 
handed down to him by the fathers, and drawn aside 
for gold and ease and political power, has laid his 
head in the Roman harlot's lap. There she soothes 
him with honeyed lies, enchains him with her lasciv- 
iousness, and beguiles him with her designs. And 
though he knows that she has brought low Spain and 
Italy and Portugal and Austria, though he knows 
that she has made Mexico to grind, a slave and blind, 
and has put out the eyes of all the South American 
states, — knowing all this, confident in his mighty 
strength, he still carelessly rests his head on her 
knees. No sooner shall she have sheared away the 
locks of his majesty, but she proposes to cry to the 
illiterates, the foreigners, the criminals, the hierarchs, 
"Enter;" and to him, her victim, no more the giant of 
the West, she will hiss, " The Philistines be upon 



318 Rome's A-Vowed t*urpose to Control the State. 

thee, Samson." Anticipating her foul purposes, mind- 
ful of the fathers who gave him birth, remembering 
his high destiny and the duties he owes to the world, 
we rush into the presence where he lies in ignominy 
listening to the poison distilling from her lips, and we 
cry, " The Philistines be upon thee, Samson." Thank 
God he has not yet lost his crown or his manly 
power 1 Methinks I see him leaping up from his 
dangerous dalliance, rising to a majesty which no na- 
tion on this earth has yet attained. He shakes him- 
self unshackled as he bounds to his feet. The glow 
of intelligence is in his eye, the warnings of history 
ring in his ears, the voice of God thrills in his heart, 
and grasping the weapons that a freeman knows how 
to use, I believe that the already alarmed and stir- 
ring Samson of the West will crush the papacy for- 
ever, and in her overthrow emancipate the world. 
(Loud and repeated applause.) 

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